No More Mister Nice Blog

2012-01-28T13:00:00.000-05:00

WILL PALIN KEEP THIS UP IF ROMNEY GETS THE NOMINATION? AND WHICH SIDE DOES THAT HELP?

Sarah Palin is suddenly all over the place. First we had Howard Fineman listing five reasons why Newt Gingrich's campaign is imploding in Florida, including this one:

The Palin Factor. Some D.C.-based establishment types were preparing to reconcile themselves to former House Speaker Gingrich, if not outright endorse him, before or after the South Carolina primary last week. But according to one such insider, who asked not to be identified because of her prominent corporate lobbying role, Gingrich fatally said on Jan. 18 -- three days before the primary -- that he would offer former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin a "major role in the next administration if I'm president." That one statement scared the accept-Newt, Republican-establishment types. "That sure did it for me, and I think for a lot of other people in town," the lobbyist said.

Now we have a blistering anti-Romney, anti-GOP Establishment screed written by Palin's ghostwriter* and posted on her Facebook page, and we have Politico declaring her to be Gingrich's "unofficial campaign surrogate."

So, is she going to keep this up past primary season, after Romney wraps it up? Is she going to go on Fox and be lukewarm about Romney, or even actively hostile? Might she even endorse some obscure third-party Jesus-'n'-guns candidate for president instead of Mitt?

And if so, does that help Mitt or hurt him?

I can see it both ways. On the one hand, Romney needs a crazy base that's motivated to vote for him. Palin's sincere backing would be of benefit in order to get that to happen.

On the other hand, he's counting on the mainstream press to tell swing voters that he's not really a right-winger, that all the crazy right-wing things he said in the primaries were just for show and he'll govern as president only a bit more conservatively than he governed Massachusetts. (Heck, ladies, he might even become pro-choice again!)

This is nonsense, of course -- if he's president, he's just going to do whatever the crazy Republicans in Congress want him to do, because they have an agenda they're hell-bent on enacting, and he's a pathetic, passve wimp who just wants to hold the office of president, not actually do anything.

But mainstream pundits may cite the opposition (or at least wariness) of Sarah Palin (and possibly a few other zealots) as evidence that Romney won't really be a right-winger. And swing voters might swallow that.

But how would these two things would balance each other out? I really don't know.

****

*Wingnuts, please don't try to persuade me that Palin writes her own Facebook posts. Here's a typical sentence -- stilted but reasonably coherent -- from the current one:

Without this necessary vetting process, the unanswered question of Governor Romney's conservative bona fides and the unanswered and false attacks on Newt Gingrich will hang in the air to demoralize many in the electorate.

Now here's something that came out of her own mouth, on Fox News, as quoted by Politico. She's responding to Peggy Noonan's characterization of Gingrich as an "angry little attack muffin":

"They maybe subscribe such characterization of Newt via words like that, but they don't subscribe those to say Mitt Romney when he or his surrogates do the same thing," she said."

I rest my case.

(And no, that wouldn't even make sense if you changed "subscribe" to "ascribe.")

2012-01-28T09:54:00.002-05:00

Rooting for Failure

Romney cheerleader James Pethokoukis gleefully presents what he calls "The economic chart that may doom the Obama presidency":

In his State of the Union response the other night, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels neatly summed up Mitt Romney’s (who has a roughly 90 percent chance of being the GOP nominee according to Intrade) economic case against President Barack Obama: “The president did not cause the economic and fiscal crises that continue in America tonight, but he was elected on a promise to fix them, and he cannot claim that the last three years have made things anything but worse.”

In other words, the Obama Recovery stinks.

Here's the chart:

Pethokoukis describes it at some length, but the gist of it is this: the Reagan recovery was awesome, and this recovery is really shitty. That's about it.

Two things strike me about this. First, this is a tacit admission that Romney has no affirmative case to make. There's just nothing there to vote for, only something to vote against. That doesn't mean he can't win--he could, if the economy is still shitty--but it does reduce Pethokoukis and all the other Romney boosters to rooting for failure.

The second thing is the reason the recovery is weak: decent private-sector growth is offset by cuts to the public sector:

The public sector has been shrinking for the last year and a half — mostly because of cuts in state and local government, with some federal cuts, especially to the military, playing a role as well. In the fourth quarter, government shrank at an annual rate of 4.5 percent.

Over the last two years, the private sector grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent, while the government shrank at an annual rate of 1.4 percent.

The combined result has been economic growth of 2.3 percent.

Cuts, I hardly need point out, that were driven by Republicans. They're rooting for failure, and they're doing their damnedest to make it happen.

2012-01-27T15:30:00.000-05:00

NEW HAMPSHIRE LEGISLATOR THINKS TSA PATDOWNS ARE WORSE THAN DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Steven D directs our attention to this:

New Hampshire Republicans Propose Bills That Prevent Police From Protecting Domestic Abuse Victims

Since the 1970s, New Hampshire police have operated under a progressive policy for handling domestic violence cases that has saved countless lives. Under current law the presumption is that an arrest will be made when police observe evidence of abuse. They have a large degree of discretion and don't need to witness the assault firsthand or obtain a legal warrant before they can separate the alleged attacker from his victim.

All that will change if Republicans get their way. The state's GOP legislators are pushing two bills that will reverse a half century of progress, the Concord Monitor reports:
...House Bill 1581 would turn the clock back 40 years to an age when a police officer could not make an arrest in a domestic violence case without first getting a warrant unless he or she actually witnessed the crime. That's an exceedingly dangerous change. Consider the following scenario, one outlined for lawmakers by retired Henniker police chief Tim Russell:

An officer is called to a home where she sees clear evidence that an assault has occurred. The furniture is overturned, the children are sobbing, and the face of the woman of the house is bruised and bleeding. It's obvious who the assailant was, but the officer arrived after the assault occurred. It's a small department, and no one else on the force is available to keep the peace until the officer finds a judge or justice of the peace to issue a warrant. The officer leaves, and the abuser renews his attack with even more ferocity, punishing his victim for having called for help. [...]

It's impossible to say how many lives the policy, in place since the 1970s, has saved or how many injuries it's prevented. If they adopt House Bill 1581, lawmakers might find out, but the price paid could be extraordinarily high.

That bill has two co-sponsors. One of them is Representative George Lambert. Domestic violence obviously doesn't bother him as much as this does:

Lawmakers and residents engaged in heated debate Tuesday over a bill that would make random airport security pat-downs and body scans criminal in New Hampshire.

The bill (HB628-FN) "makes the touching or viewing with a technological device of a person’s breasts or genitals by a government security agent without probable cause a sexual assault," according to the introductory text of the bill.

... "That is a crime in this state, and we should charge them every single time," said bill co-sponsor Rep. George Lambert, R-Litchfield.

A co-sponsor of that bill wants to put every TSA worker convicted under the law in the state sex offender registry.

Lambert, by the way, is a 9/11 truther, as you'll learn from the video posted here (the relevant portion is between 9:00 and 11:00).

The other co-sponsor of House Bill 1581 is Representative Dan Itse, who has won the admiration of Glenn Beck for this:

NH State Representative Dan Itse, a local hero among freedom lovers, ... has filed HCR 6, a bill that would reaffirm New Hampshire's sovereignty in the event that the federal government oversteps its agreement with us as outlined in our Constitution.

Dan appeared on Fox News with Glenn Beck to discuss the meaning and purpose of the bill. He explains that it is not so much a secession bill, but a reaffirmation of both our Federal and State Constitutions and the agreement states have with the federal government....

You can watch the Beck interview at the link (warning: the link goes to the Ron Paul Forums). Read the bill here. (Am I wrong to be a bit concerned when the supporters of a bill feel the need to reassure me that it's not a secession bill?)

Itse lists his "core beliefs" here. Core belief #2 is:

2. My first job as a State Representative is to protect you rights from the government.

Core belief #4 is:

4. Life begins at conception and continues through natural death.

Both legislators are affiliated with the libertarian Free State Project. Make of that what you will.

****

Regarding the other disturbing New Hampshire domestic violence bill that's been under consideration:

The other bill Republicans have proposed, HB 1608, limits judges' ability to order the arrest of someone who has violated a domestic violence restraining order by contacting or abusing the person named in the order. It would also prevent judges from ordering defendants to surrender their weapons or block them from buying guns.

That bill has been killed in committee.

(Also at Booman Tribune in a somewhat different form.)

2012-01-27T13:43:00.002-05:00

DAVID BROOKS FAULTS OBAMA FOR ... DOING WHAT DAVID BROOKS RECOMMENDED

David Brooks, February 11, 2010:

Obama was inaugurated in the midst of an economic crisis, and the activist policy proposals took precedence....

It was not to be. Voters are in no mood for a wave of domestic transformation. The economy is already introducing enough insecurity into their lives. Unlike 1932 and 1965, Americans do not trust Washington to take them on a leap of faith....

The country has reacted harshly to the course the administration ended up embracing.... Independent voters have swung against the administration. Voters are not reacting to the particulars of each bill. They are reacting against the total activist onslaught....

The next challenge is to find a new project....

... he could propose some incremental changes in a range of areas and prove Washington can at least take small steps.

David Brooks today:

It's sad to [consider] the medium-sized policy morsels that President Obama put in his State of the Union address. He had some big themes in the speech, but the policies were mere appetizers. The Republicans absurdly call Obama a European socialist on the stump, but the Obama we saw Tuesday night was a liberal incrementalist.

There was nothing big....

Instead, there were a series of modest proposals that poll well.

... the core point is that these policies are incremental, not transformational. You could pass them all and the country might be slightly better off or slightly worse off, but it wouldn't be on a different trajectory....

In normal times, that sober, incremental approach would be admirable. In normal times, the best sort of change is gradual, flexible and constant. But these are not normal times....

So voters are scared of major change in really bad times, and hungry for incrementalism -- except when Obama agrees and goes incremental, at which point the country suddenly becomes desperate for major change.

Right. Got it.

Of course, I'm concealing the real explanation from you. In 2010, the major changes Brooks insisted that voters didn't want were health care reform, the stimulus, a proposed cap-and-trade bill, and so on. The major change Brooks thinks is absolutely essential now is ...

Simpson-Bowles.

But Brooks couldn't just say, "My change good, your change bad." In both cases, he said whatever Obama was doing was wrong. Funny how it always works out that way with Brooks.

2012-01-27T09:30:00.000-05:00

AIRBRUSHED OUT OF ALL PHOTOS IN THE PARTY ARCHIVES

Peggy Noonan today, writing about the volatility in the GOP presidential polls:

What it appears we are seeing is a new iteration of the age-old split between the grassroots and a perceived GOP establishment. It is like split between the Goldwater forces and the Eastern Rockefeller wing of the party in the 1960s. It is an update of the split between the Buchanan brigades and the establishment in 1992. It is the old True Conservative versus Ambivalent Accomodationist split.

Actually it's more a wound than a split, and the only one who healed it in our time was Ronald Reagan.

Nonsense. Just among presidential candidates -- just among presidents -- George W. Bush unified the hell out of Peggy's people. They cheered and wept and pumped their fists when he talked through a bullhorn or landed in a plane on an aircraft carrier. Noonan herself captured the feeling just after the 2004 election, when she approvingly quoted a military man saying of Bush, "he's got two of 'em," a remark she says she delightedly repeated to Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth, who apparently was also delighted. Yeah, I think that guy brought this party together.

But all Noonan will say today is this, referring to the healing powers of Reagan:

The healing lasted roughly a quarter-century, until the second Bush administration, when everything began to come apart again. The GOP was now a party split on spending, immigration, a dozen other issues. It was rocked even more than it knew by the crash of 2008, and further sundered.

It's as if Bush's first term never happened. And of course she says this, because even Republicans know in their heart of hearts that Bush busted the budget and stumbled from foreign policy disaster to foreign policy disaster, 9/11 to Tora Bora to hanged bodies on a Fallujah bridge to Abu Ghraib, and they all -- all -- cheered him on. You can't blame them for not wanting to acknowledge this.

****

The main point of Noonan's column is that Newt Gingrich is not even potentially a Republican unifier in the Reagan mold -- but, of course, he was a unifier of the party until his speakership fell apart, even when he was blaming the crime of a child murderer on liberalism and equating Democratic policies with Woody Allen's love life. I don't recall anyone in the GOP complaining, as long as he was on top. (That's the same thing that happened with Bush, of course. Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.)

And, of course, Rush Limbaugh has united the party for more than two decades, and Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes have united it for a decade and a half -- until recently, when some Republicans have begun to question whether their de facto co-chairing of the party is responsible for the embarrassments of the current campaign. All three of these guys have had a hell of a ride, though. Maybe it's because they just throw bombs from the sidelines -- they never actually run for anything. Hey, Peg, you want a united party? Maybe all Republicans should follow that example, and leave elected office to the rest of us.

2012-01-26T23:28:00.002-05:00

TWO-TRICK PONY

I only watched bits of tonight's debate, but Newt Gingrich didn't say anything particularly noteworthy while I was watching, and the general pundit consensus is that he didn't come close to having the big night he needed to have to stop the free-spending, sorta-surging Mitt Romney in Florida.

And, well, why should he have had a good night? People say he's had "a series of impressive debate performances," or words to that effect, but what he's had, mostly, is a series of debates in which he's baited a moderator -- Chris Wallace in August, John Harris in September, Maria Bartiromo in November, and, of course, John King earlier this month. There was also the nasty exchange with Juan Williams this month, which was a two-fer: Gingrich got to attack a representative of the media who was also a black person, on a question about race.

But if you don't have a non-white questioner asking Gingrich a question about race, and the questioners you do have don't say anything he finds particularly provocative, he's got no game -- he needs someone who gives him an excuse to go on the attack. It turns out he's not even as good at attacking Barack Obama in debates as Mitt Romney is. He's just not very impressive if there isn't someone he can look in the eye and verbally bludgeon. He certainly doesn't get the partisan crowd pumped. That's all he's got -- deprive him of it and he's not even good for laughs for the rest of us.

2012-01-26T17:00:00.000-05:00

DEATH OF HIPSTER

Some junk e-mail I received today (also available here):

AMERICANS ELECT NAMED SXSW AWARD FINALIST
Innovative Technology Acknowledged for New Way to Pick a President

WASHINGTON, D.C., JANUARY 26, 2012 - AmericansElect.org has been selected as a 2012 Interactive Awards Finalist in the experimental category by South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival held in Austin, Texas. Americans Elect is on the cutting edge of political reform - changing the way we nominate a President of the United States, and also emerging as one of the best new websites in the marketplace today.

“Americans Elect uniquely offers everyone an online way to participate, regardless of party affiliation, in political discussion and debate, and results in a balanced ticket that is on the ballot nationwide,” said Joshua S. Levine, Chief Technology Officer of Americans Elect....

The SXSW Interactive festival takes place March 9-13, 2012, featuring presentations showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas.

SXSW, you're pathetic. And hipsterism is now officially dead.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-26T13:30:00.000-05:00

ROMNEY RELEASES TAX INFORMATION, DOES BETTER WITH FLORIDA GOP VOTERS

I know, I know: it's wrong to assume that correlation implies causation. But look at what's going on with Florida GOP voters. Nate Silver:

Polls Suggest Gingrich's Support May Have Peaked

Polling released within the past 24 hours suggests that Mitt Romney may have stopped and possibly reversed Newt Gingrich's momentum before the Florida primary on Tuesday.

... In fact, I suspect ... that there is enough evidence -- when you look carefully at the day-to-day results -- to conclude that Mr. Romney has re-emerged as the slight favorite in Florida instead....

The poll chart at Talking Points Memo shows Romney's Florida lead over Gingrich getting bigger and bigger over the past couple of days -- it's now at 7.7% The latest survey to be added to TPM's poll mix is a Monmouth University survey (PDF) showing Mitt up by 7. It was conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Gee, what happened Monday night and Tuesday morning? Well, among other things, Romney released the tax information that was supposed to hurt him tremendously. Guess what? It hasn't -- not with Republican voters in Florida it hasn't. You can draw the same conclusion from a Rasmussen poll conducted yesterday (Romney up by 8, after trailing Gingrich by 9 four days earlier) and an Insider Advantage poll (PDF) also conducted yesterday (Romney up by 8 in this one as well, with a similar reversal of fortune).

Now, there are a couple of obvious explanations for Romney's mini-surge in Florida: he has a much heavier TV presence in the state, and Gingrich delivered a tepid performance in the last debate. (Oh, and many media wingnuts are attacking Gingrich.)

But shouldn't that be offset by Romney's tax stuff, if (as mainstream pundits keep telling us) Republicans as well as Democrats think the plutocrats have gone too far in this country?

Florida Republicans clearly don't believe that. At the very least, they're giving Romney a pass on his wealth, his business practices, and his tax rate. Maybe it's too much to say that being a fat cat is helping Romney with these Republicans, but it sure isn't hurting him.

(X-posted at Balloon Juice.)

2012-01-26T10:53:00.001-05:00

EXCELLENT TIMING

Damn clever of President Obama to get into a tiff over immigration with Arizona governor Jan Brewer during the brief ten-day window when the leading Republican candidates are falling all over themselves trying to pretend that they don't hate brown people, in pursuit of Florida's Cuban-American GOP voter bloc. If Obama and Brewer had had words on this subject anytime before the polls closed in South Carolina, or anytime after they close in Florida, you can be sure that Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich would demagogue the issue, accusing Obama of traitorously failing to secure the U.S. borders with nuclear weapons and a lake of fire. (Well, maybe that would just be Gingrich.) But right now, when they're faking Hispanophilia, what can they do? What can they say? Following their current strategies, they can't even launch a full immigration attack on him in the debate tonight, can they? So well played, Mr. President.

****

UPDATE: Forgot to add: a privatized lake of fire.

2012-01-26T07:44:00.001-05:00

OBAMA DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, PART MCXXVIII

From Fox Nation, via Weasel Zippers (click to enlarge):

"Oh my God! The Kenyan Muslim socialist needs a Teleprompter for the words "Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America"?!

No, schmuck -- he needs a Teleprompter for the entire speech he gave in Cedar Rapids, which ran for 3,498 words.

And I eliminated from my word count the 35 times he was interrupted by "(Laughter)" or "(Applause)," including

Thank you, everybody. God bless you. God bless America. (Applause.)

2012-01-25T23:45:00.002-05:00

For Fuck's Sake, People, Get It Right

For the record:

That story about Callista Gingich having a woman arrested for breastfeeding? It's from the Weekly World News.

That poll with 91% approval for the State of the Union Address? It's from a year ago.

We have enough of the facts on our side that we don't need to rely on things we wish were true.

Update: Last night Rachel Maddow corrected the previous night's item, noting that the poll she had cited was a year old. Good for her.

2012-01-25T17:30:00.006-05:00

Six A Dozen Impossible Things Before Breakfast

So it turns out that Romney paid an effective rate of just 13.9%. It's too early to tell what the political impact will be (although early indications look bad for Romney), but we have already seen some pre-emptive damage control. Last week Republican apparatchik James Pethokoukis wrote a column arguing that (in the words of the title) "Actually, Mitt Romney's tax rate is too high".

Yes, he really did.

Part of me wants to say, hey, if you wanna try that line, knock yerselves out. Let us know how it works out for ya.

But of course that isn't the point. This isn't a serious attempt to convince anyone that Mitt really is paying too much in taxes; this is about the underlying talking points, the distortions and irrelevancies and dubious assumptions necessary to arrive at that absurd conclusion. We'll be seeing a lot more of all these talking points if (when) Romney is the GOP nominee. On that basis, it's taking them one by one.

He starts out with a false dichotomy:

It’s real simple: If you think the biggest problem facing the United States today is income inequality, then you should be outraged that Mitt Romney’s income tax rate isn’t higher. But if you instead think America’s biggest problem is high unemployment and a lack of economic growth, then you should be outraged that Romney is paying any income taxes at all. Really.

He frames "income inequality" and "high unemployment and a lack of growth" as two opposing issues, as if you can deal with one or the other but not both. In reality, of course, the two are linked, and income inequality actively impedes economic recovery. Really.

Next up, some bait-and-switch statistics:

1. While Romney’s tax rate is—in his own words—”probably closer to 15 percent than anything,” that’s still higher than the 8.2 percent average ~~total~~ effective income tax rate (as of 2010) of U.S. households (once you factor in various tax credits)....Even if you add in the payroll tax, the effective tax rate of the middle fifth of U.S. taxpayers is 12.8 percent.

Thing One: he's comparing Romney's effective rate with an average effective rate that excludes payroll taxes. Romney's "capital gains" don't have any payroll tax on top of them; that 15% (or rather, 13.9%) is his total tax burden.

Thing two: when talking about effective rate including payroll taxes, Pethokoukis suddenly switches from overall average effective rate to the average rate for the middle quintile. Why? Because according to the linked chart, the middle quintile pays 12.8% (i.e., lower than Romney's effective rate), while the overall average is 18.1% (which would be higher).

Of course, no wingnut discussion of taxes is complete without this chestnut:

Indeed, nearly half of U.S. households pay no income tax at all. Their average effective tax rate is actually negative.

Um, right. Mostly because they don't have any fucking money, dumbfuck. (Except for the millionaires who are able to game the system so they don't pay anything. But I doubt Pethokoukis wants to call them to our attention.)

Now, we get another classic wingnut talking point, the "double tax":

2. The 15 percent headline rate is just the start. The capital gains tax is a double tax. For instance, corporate profits are taxed first as income and then a second time when they are distributed to shareholders as dividends.

You may recall this talking point being used in arguments against inheritance taxes. Then as now, it's silly because money isn't taxed, transactions are. When you buy something at a store and then the store pays taxes on its profits, that isn't "double taxation" because it's two different transactions. Corporation taking a profit? One transaction. Corporation paying dividends? Second transaction. Two transactions, no double tax.

At this point we get some calculated semantic imprecision, with the feel-good word "investment" covering up for all kinds of sins:

3. We shouldn’t tax what we want more of. And the real problem with the capital gains tax isn’t the rate or how it is structured, but what is taxed: gains on investments, which are savings put to work. Economists of all stripes have been saying Americans have consumed too much and invested too little over the past decade. So why would we want to tax investment even heavier, as the Obamacrats want to do?

Thing One: a good chunk of Romney's "investment" wasn't investment at all; it was compensation for managing money invested by other people.

Thing Two: given the perverse incentives inherent in Bain's kind of investment--private-equity buyouts--do we really want more of them?

Thing Three: how does a low capital gains tax encourage savings (i.e., investment) among the 95% who have little or no capital gains income?

[Update: Commenter Chris Andersen points out an even more fundamental problem with this:

the salaries paid to workers is *also* an investment because workers use their salary to go out and buy the stuff that America makes and thus puts the money back into the economy to be scooped up by enterprising "job creators".

In other words, the salary paid to a worker is just as influential on the engine of the economy as is investments. Yet our current tax code treats the latter as much more valuable in its contribution.]

Okay, now it's time for a little fearmongering:

Indeed, we shouldn’t want to tax capital at all. As an AEI study on consumption taxes explains: “The income tax’s penalty on saving is an undesirable distortion of consumer choice. It also causes less capital to be accumulated in the United States. The reduction in capital accumulation reduces labor productivity and lowers real wages throughout the economy, depressing the standard of living of future generations.

Which might be marginally more persuasive if we hadn't had much higher growth during periods with a much higher capital gains rate. Or, for that matter, if the causal link between productivity and wage growth hadn't been broken years ago.

Next up, Pethokoukis beats down a strawman argument with an appeal to authority:

4. So the main reason people want to keep taxing capital—or even tax it more heavily—is one of theology rather than sound economics. As the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics puts it: “Strange as it may sound, most economists would agree that having zero taxes on capital income is theoretically the best thing to do. But many reject putting this theory into practice because they think that too much of the benefit would go to the ‘wrong’ people, namely high-income households and the wealthy.”

"Most economists"? "Concise Encyclopedia of Economics"? Boy, that sure sounds authoritative! Of course, it's a publication of the Liberty Fund (legacy of Pierre Goodrich), so it may be more accurate to say "most libertarian economists".

That’s right, the desire to make sure the wealthy like Romney “pay their fair share” is desired by class warriors even if it make everyone poorer than they otherwise would be.

"Class warriors"! Everybody take a drink!

And just to seal the deal, we have one more appeal to authority--to a guy who, in the wingnut imagination, looms as a secular saint for liberals:

5. Take it away, JFK ( in his Special Message to the Congress on Tax Reduction and Reform from Jan. 24, 1963): ”The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility and flow of risk capital from static to more dynamic situations, the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential growth of the economy.”

The capital gains tax rate throughout Kennedy's term was 25%, or ten points higher than it is now. Next question?

So there it is. This is what they do, because with a candidate like Romney it's all they can do. They're just going to keep throwing the linguine, hoping that some of it will stick. And a lot of it will. And the only thing we can do in defense is become so familiar with all their talking points that we can swat them down before they get all dry and caked on and we need to use some kind of nasty cleanser and a stiff-bristle brush to...um, well, you know what I mean.

2012-01-25T16:16:00.000-05:00

WELL, AT LEAST HE'S SMARTER THAN THAT BEARDED "NADA" GUY

Here's something that's making wingnuts grin like idiots right now:

"My Message is Simple": Obama's SOTU Written at 8th Grade Level for Third Straight Year

Obama's SOTU addresses have the lowest average Flesch-Kincaid score of any modern president; Obama owns three of the six lowest-scoring addresses since FDR

... for the third straight Address, the President's speech was written at an eighth-grade level.

... A Smart Politics study of the 70 orally delivered State of the Union Addresses since 1934 finds the text of Obama's 2012 speech to have tallied the third lowest score on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, at an 8.4 grade level....

Yeah, but at least Obama is less of a simpleton than that Ernest Hemingway guy -- if you take his story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and put it in this Flesch-Kincaid reading level calculator, it comes out at a fifth-grade reading level. What a moron, that Hemingway!

Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral"? Also fifth-grade. Same with this excerpt from The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Cretins, both of them!

But you know what gets a really, really high score?

This.

It's written at a grade level of seventeen. (Which I guess is the first year of grad school.) Know what it is?

An Alan Keyes speech.

It gets graded that way because it has sentences like this:

We stand on the common ground of an understanding of justice that sees rights, that sees the difference between right and wrong, as dependent not upon willful attributes of ambition or natural physical attributes of color, but instead is dependent upon the will of the Almighty God who determined all of it and who has also determined that one of the attributes that we share as human beings is our unalienable right which leads then to a form of government based upon consent — and that is the spirit that the Tea Party movement expresses.

Lots of words, strung together semi-coherently -- that's what Obama refuses to give us. So Alan Keyes is smarter than he is! And smarter than Hemingway and Carver and McCarthy! The math proves it!

2012-01-25T14:00:00.000-05:00

SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR BENEFIT CUTS

Mistermix:

Do you remember when one of the big MSM critiques of Democrats was the lack of optimism they showed, how they were always scolding and negative about our future, and how Americans, who are fundamentally optimistic, couldn't identify with the party and its candidates because of it? I do, but apparently [Eric Cantor] doesn't, because I'll be damned if he cracked more than a reluctant smile last night.

It's not just Cantor and Boehner at the SOTU, it's also Gingrich, Romney, Santorum and Paul in the debates. Those twice-weekly pissing matches are glum, overly serious affairs contrasting the grim meathook future of another four years of Barack Obama with an even darker apocalypse of program cuts and never-ending austerity under the Republicans....

I remember that critique of Democrats, too, and it wasn't limited to the media. Recall Poppy Bush at the 1984 vice presidential debate:

Almost every place you can point, contrary to Mr. Mondale's - I gotta be careful - but contrary of how he goes around just saying everything bad. If he sees -- If somebody sees a silver lining, he finds a big black cloud out there. Whine on harvest moon!

But mistermix is absolutely right about contemporary Republicans being decline-obsessed miserabilists -- and you really, really don't want that to be your party's public posture going into a presidential election, because in presidential elections Americans very much prefer to vote for hope.

And in addition to the people mistermix names, I'd add the guy Republicans think might save them. Really, wingnuts -- this guy makes you say, "A star is born"?

"...On these evenings, Presidents naturally seek to find the sunny side of our national condition. But when President Obama claims that the state of our union is anything but grave, he must know in his heart that this is not true....

"In our economic stagnation and indebtedness, we are only a short distance behind Greece, Spain, and other European countries now facing economic catastrophe. But ours is a fortunate land. Because the world uses our dollar for trade, we have a short grace period to deal with our dangers. But time is running out, if we are to avoid the fate of Europe, and those once-great nations of history that fell from the position of world leadership.

"So 2012 is a year of true opportunity, maybe our last, to restore an America of hope and upward mobility, and greater equality....

The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing. Listening to them much longer will mean that these proud programs implode, and take the American economy with them..."

Ready to kill yourself yet? I would be if I took this seriously.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-25T12:12:00.000-05:00

FREE TO CHOOSE

I'm not sure why a profile of dopey Saturday Night Live cast member turned dopey wingnut commentator Victoria Jackson is the cover story of this week's Village Voice -- the story is only intermittently interesting, in a Wes-Anderson-meet-Fox-News way (Jackson had Bible-thumping grandparents and tried to win SNL cast members over to Jesus, her father is a self-declared homophobe and ex-gymnast who's obsessed with fat people, her first husband was a fire-eater). But I very much enjoyed the lead paragraphs:

Victoria Jackson hurtles through intersections and down side streets while using her left hand to hold a Flip cam to her face. The inside of her car -- a weathered Honda Civic with "Nobama," Marco Rubio, and Tea Party bumper stickers -- smells like it has been fumigated with sweet incense. Steering with elbows and the occasional pinkie, she opens a Bible inscribed with her name and quotes Scripture in her inimitable high-pitched voice. Then she turns the camera on a reporter riding shotgun. She suspects he's a socialist. "Don't you think that some people are on welfare from cradle to grave," she demands, "because the government is encouraging them never to work?"

"Leaving on a Jet Plane," her ringtone, blares from some unknown recess of her purse, and she's suddenly burrowing through loads of makeup cases to find it. "What if we crashed and died on video?" she says, laughing wildly. "That would be the most viral video of the world! You'd be dead, but you'd have a really viral video!"

Can you believe all those nanny-state liberals want to crack down on "distracted driving"? What could those behavior Nazis possibly be thinking? Why on earth are they so afraid to trust the people with freedom?

2012-01-25T10:24:00.002-05:00

TALKING WITH THE TAXMAN

Love Fox Nation's headline for the State of the Union response by Mitch Daniels:

Here's some of the poetry:

In word and deed, the president and his allies tell us that we just cannot handle ourselves in this complex, perilous world without their benevolent protection. Left to ourselves, we might pick the wrong health insurance, the wrong mortgage, the wrong school for our kids; why, unless they stop us, we might pick the wrong light bulb!

Yeah, right -- no one needs any government regulation whatsoever because no human being has ever made a choice with terrible consequences as a result of nonexistent or inadequate regulation -- no one has ever taken Thalidomide or consumed soft drinks containing cocaine or used tapeworm-based diet aids or invested in triple-A-rated subprime-mortgage-backed CDOs from Goldman Sachs. Given freedom!!!, bad things simply can't happen.

Bonus points to Daniels for the lightbulb reference; five bucks says that the next Republican president will have all the curly bulbs removed from the White House within 24 hours of being sworn in, accompanied by a boastful press release. And I won't be surprised if this year's GOP nominee waves an incandescent bulb at the convention during his acceptance speech and says, "From my cold, dead hands!"

Oh, and that school-choice reference? Hey, Mitch, the early 1990s called -- they want their talking point back.

2012-01-24T22:59:00.002-05:00

CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN?

If the speech seemed frequently strong and inspiring, and seemed like a campaign speech -- in fact, a 2008-style campaign speech -- I'd say it's because President Obama seems to know he has about as much power to get this agenda enacted right now as he did four years ago, when he wasn't president yet. When you're not president, you run through a lot of promises you'd like to deliver on, though you know you may never even get the opportunity. Obama is president, but he's in the same position -- he can't get much done. In his State of the Union addresses in 2010 and 2011, you felt that he didn't quite believe that everything he wanted to do would run into a brick wall; now he seems to know better. So it's as if he was talking tonight about what could be the way a challenger does. Hell, why not? Republicans ran the country four years ago and Republicans run the country now. We still need hope and change.

2012-01-24T18:28:00.003-05:00

SO WOULD YOU SAY NOW THAT GINGRICH IS USING CODE WORDS FOR "MORMON"?

Back in August, Politico's Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin told us that in 2012 the Obama campaign would "portray [Mitt] Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama's advisers in about a dozen interviews, 'weird.'" They went on to insinuate -- offering no evidence -- that this might be Mormon-bashing in coded form:

None of the Obama advisers interviewed made any suggestion that Romney's personal qualities would be connected to his minority Mormon faith, but the step from casting Romney as a bit off to raising questions about religion may not be a large step for some of the incumbent's supporters.

Raw Story's Megan Carpentier and The Atlantic's Elspeth Reeve agreed that the word "weird" seemed like a code word for "Mormon."

Well, now we have Newt Gingrich telling David Brody of Pat Robertson CBN News that -- unlike Romney -- he's "normal." So is that Mormon-bashing language, too?

In a one-on-one interview with The Brody File, Newt Gingrich says that he has "not hidden from the facts of my life, that I have confessed my weaknesses" and he believes that, in part, is a reason why evangelicals are able to get behind his candidacy.

He goes on to say that, "it may make me more normal than somebody who wanders around seeming perfect and maybe not understanding the human condition, and the challenges of life for normal people." (Dig at Romney???)

Here's the full version of the quote, in response to a question about "forgiveness" in the Christian sense:

Newt Gingrich: Well, I think it's important. It's also important that they recognize that I have not hidden from the facts of my life, that I have confessed my weaknesses, and that I have had to go to God for forgiveness and for reconciliation. And I think most people can identify, either with themselves or with loved ones, that life has moments that are very sad, you wish wouldn't have occurred. And you look back on them and you seek forgiveness for not having done everything you could have.

So, I think in that sense, it may make me more normal than somebody who wanders around seeming perfect and maybe not understanding the human condition, and the challenges of life for normal people.

Now, you'll say that Gingrich (unlike those evil Obama advisers) is being very explicit: this isn't about Mormonism, it's about Gingrich yielding to temptation and Romney seemingly never yielding. Nothing anti-Mormon there -- right? Well, consider the song "Turn It Off," from Broadway's Book of Mormon:

When you start to get confused because of thoughts in your head,
Don't feel those feelings!
Hold them in instead

Turn it off, like a light switch
just go click!
It's a cool little Mormon trick!

Isn't that a Mormon stereotype? That LDSers don't yield to temptations (of the flesh and otherwise) because of their weird religion?

No? Not convinced? Well, I think my case is about as strong as Smith and Martin's.

2012-01-24T16:40:00.000-05:00

GINGRICH MOTIVATES THE MOB

I've got nothing to add to this except ... wow:

What were you just saying on Fox News, Allen West?

WEST: I think race baiting really comes out when people are, you know, using the issue of race as a means by which to separate us and trying to draw attention such as what you heard Congressman Clyburn and also Al Sharpton saying that Speaker Gingrich was speaking in some secret, you know, race code or something of that nature, trying to draw attention to something that doesn't even exist and is not there.

Oh, yeah, right. (West was referring to Gingrich's "food stamp president" remarks, but he could just as well be referring to Gingrich's talk about "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.")

2012-01-24T13:41:00.001-05:00

GINGRICH'S OVATIONS ARE YOUR NEW INCANDESCENT LIGHT BULBS, OR BREAKFAST FETUSES

I'm reading this now, and it reminds me of a few other things I've read in recently:

Newt Gingrich says he won't "allow" the moderators of future GOP presidential debates to keep the crowd out of it.

Speaking on Tuesday to Fox News, Gingrich took the opportunity that was denied him at Monday night's debate, and blasted the media....

"We're going to serve notice on future debates that we won't tolerate -- we're just not going to allow that to happen," Gingrich continued. "That's wrong -- the media doesn't control free speech. People ought to be able to applaud if they want to. It was almost silly." ...

I read this a few hours after I spotted an Amanda Marcotte post in which she tried to figure out why the hell right-wingers are so obsessed with blocking the changeover to non-incandescent lightbulbs. (Her best answers, in my opinion: "Pettiness" and "It pisses off the liberals.") And yesterday there was this rather astute David Frum essay, in which he reminded us what Newt Gingrich thought would be the keys to Republican victory in the 2004 presidential election (with poll numbers to back him up!):

"1. A work requirement for welfare: 87% of Americans say yes, 5% no. John Kerry and the Senate Democrats have blocked the bill for three years.
2. Government should help faith-based initiatives help the poor: 72% of Americans agree, 26% disagree; Kerry is with the 26%.
3. U.S. interests are more important than international organizations: 73-24; Kerry's positions favor the 24%.
4. Violent attackers of pregnant women who kill the baby should be prosecuted for killing the baby: 84% of Americans say yes, 9% no. Kerry voted no.
5. Children should be allowed to pray at school: 78% of Americans agree; Kerry is against it."

As Frum says:

Looking back on that Gingrich platform from the perspective of eight years later, it's striking how utterly irrelevant those five highlighted points were to the largest problems of the time.

... to Gingrich, such substantive issues were not the stuff of campaign politics. Campaign politics was about finding ways to define your opponent as alien, hostile and dangerous. The definition need not correspond to any actual real-world problem.

But a focus on relatively insignificant, tangential wedge issues is mainstream Republicanism in the Limbaugh/Fox era. It's how you keep the base pumped up and voting. Moreover, Fox and talk radio have made right-wing voters think of culture war as entertainment. So issues like these are bread and circuses for the wingnut rabble -- and while the phrase "bread and circuses" usually refers to non-political distractions, please note that the righty rabble prefers political distractions, of the trivial, tangential variety.

The right-wing base just wants reasons to get angry at liberals, and wants to imagine (or achieve) victories over liberals; victories of any size will suffice. If victory can't be achieved, a heightened sense of grievance is immensely satisfying to these folks.

Gingrich never tires of looking for such wedge issues -- oh, sure, Michele Bachmann beat him to the lightbulb issue, but look how many such issues he came up with in '04. And now her's trying to turn debate rules into another such issue.

And hey, you can't blame Gingrich for persisting in this approach, because a belief in its appropriateness is widespread on the right. Consider this guy:

...An Oklahoma lawmaker files a bill to ban the making and selling of food or products that use aborted human fetuses.

State Senator Ralph Shortey says he's done research and found reports that companies have used stem cells in the research and development of food.

“I don’t know if it is happening in Oklahoma, it may be, it may not be. What I am saying is that if it does happen then we are not going to allow it to manufacture here," says Shortey

The lawmaker that represents Oklahoma County couldn’t give any specific examples.

“There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors," says Shortey....

I wonder if Newt wishes he'd gotten to this issue first.

(Oklahoma story via KagroX.)

2012-01-24T08:18:00.000-05:00

MITT ROMNEY'S PERSISTENT SENSE OF SHAME

Really? Mitt Romney released tax information last night and didn't immediately post it online, or make it available to be posted?

The Romney campaign leaked out portions of his tax returns to selected news outlets tonight....

And this on top of the fact that it was a limited release of information, which also suggests shame:

The release of his taxes is unlikely to satisfy Democrats, who said they will continue to push for more transparency -- particularly if Republicans select Romney to face Obama in November. Democratic strategist Paul Begala called on Romney to release 12 years of returns -- just as his father did when he ran for president in 1968.

"If you release one year, you can pretty it up," Begala said. "He's got to go back a dozen years and really show us -- or a lot of fair-minded people are going to conclude that he probably skated with paying less, or maybe even zero, for some of those years."

This is Romney's big problem, at least during GOP primary season. It's not that he's rich. It's not the he pays a lower tax rate than whoever prepared his taxes pays (and it's not that, under certain GOP tax proposals, he'll pay a lower rate than the people who clean his toilets pay). It's that he's embarrassed. Republicans want a proud class warrior fighting on the side of the rich. And, for the general election, I still say that swing voters are (depressingly) not very class-conscious, and would let him slide if he weren't furtive about his wealth.

Regarding last night's debate, I think Gingrich needs to keep making the rubes pump their fists to stay in the lead, and his fatigue and failure to land any blows means that Romney effectively won -- tie goes to the plodder. But I also think we got a sense of Romney's shame, as Charles Blow notes:

And Gingrich knows Romney's weakness. He squirms like a worm on a hook whenever someone points out his wealth.

In the middle of Romney's attack, Gingrich went right for it:
Gingrich: What's the gross revenue of Bain in the years you were associated with it? What's the gross revenue?

Romney, stammering a bit: Very substantial. But I think it's irrelevant compared with the fact you were working for Freddie Mac.

Gingrich, to audible chuckles from the otherwise quiet crowd: Wait a minute. Very substantial?
"Very substantial" is just the kind of non-answer answer that makes people suspicious. It's not that he doesn't know, but that he doesn't want to tell.

The Washington Post report on the Romney tax release practically hands Romney a talking point:

The couple gave away $7 million in charitable contributions over the past two years, including at least $4.1 million to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints....

The Romneys sent somewhat less to Washington over that period, paying an estimated $6.2 million in federal income taxes.

Can't you imagine how a proud right-winger would use this in a GOP debate? "I'm not going to apologize for the fact that we give more money to charity than we give to the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.!" C'mon, Mitt, this is easy!

I know, I know: Southern Bible-thumpers won't like the fact that Mitt gave so much to the Mormon church. Well, Southern Bible-thumpers used to be taught to distrust Catholics, and Mitt's two chief rivals are Catholic.

And yes, I know that Romney's tax rate is awfully low. But I don't think most Americans even know what their own tax rate is.

I still think a Mitt Romney with a swaggering personality could get away with a lot of what he's acknowledging with great reluctance. I got a Swiss bank account, tax shelters in the Caymans -- it sounds like rap lyric circa 1987. Just go for it, Mitt. Own it.

2012-01-23T17:29:00.001-05:00

ONCE AGAIN: EVIL COMMIE LIBERAL PRESIDENTS AREN'T THE ONLY ONES WHO GET STOOD UP BY JOCKS

The Boston Bruins were honored at the White House today for their Stanley Cup victory, but goalie Tim Thomas, a big Glenn Beck fan, refused to attend.

This (like a similar snub by five NASCAR drivers last September) is going to be taken by wingnuts as a sign that Obama is a big fat loser and someone real Americans recognize as a traitor -- the implication being that nothing like this would ever happen to a Republican.

Except that (as I noted at the time of the NASCAR incident) it does to happen to Republican presidents:

Um, anyone remember Michael Jordan snubbing President George H.W. Bush in 1991 when the NBA champion Chicago Bulls were invited to the White House? Or Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen and five of his players snubbing President George W. Bush when the team was invited to the White House in 2006? Or Miami Dolphins coach Nick Saban and defensive end Jason Tayloe snubbing W later that same year?

I understand the conventional wisdom: this kind of thing reflects badly on the president when the president is a Democrat, but it reflects badly on the athlete when the president is a Republican. But even if it is the conventional wisdom, you're still an idiot if you accept that conventional wisdom.

And as for you, Tim, here's a song that seems apropos. It's by your namesake.

2012-01-23T13:20:00.001-05:00

COKIE ROBERTS KINDA HEARTS NEWT, AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS ON THE GOP FRONT-RUNNER

Cokie Roberts on NPR this morning, talking about Newt Gingrich:

He's essentially channeling Ronald Reagan, but less sunny and more...

See if you can guess the last word of that sentence. I'll wait.

Here it is:

He's essentially channeling Ronald Reagan, but less sunny and more analytical.

Yeah, "analytical" -- that's le mot juste for Newt Gingrich, isn't it? "Food stamp president"? "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior"? Voting GOP prevents mothers from killing all their children? Woody Allen's marriage to Soon-yi is Democratic? Oh, yes, brilliant -- analytically brilliant!

Cokie goes on to say:

Democrats are just salivating at running against Newt Gingrich, with all of his baggage. But they should take a look at how they salivated against-- running against Ronald Reagan, too, and maybe be careful what they wish for.

Oh, please. Look, given the awfulness of the economy (and the potential increase in awfulness via Europe), you'd be crazy to say that Gingrich couldn't possibly win, but really -- this is America, no? Every winning presidential candidate has to find a way to go all Frank Capra on the voters. Even Richard Nixon managed it. Newt can't. He just can't do Humble Everyman. Not even Peggy Noonan at her peak can make him capable of faking that.

Reagan was a partisan attack dog the public thought was a classic Capraesque grandpappy. He could play the part expertly. Gingrich can't play it at all.

****

Meanwhile, I see that Mitt Romney has a pretty hard-hitting ad up about Gingrich and Freddie Mac:

I'm not sure why this line of attack isn't sticking. I know that the GOP crazy base probably thinks that anything any white person does to make massive amounts of money while wearing a suit and not directly taking a government paycheck is a good thing, but this is Freddie Mac, dammit! Wingers hate Fannie and Freddie! Why doesn't this hurt Newt?

Maybe it's the Rob Corddry syndrome -- it's not important that Gingrich consorted with Freddie Mac; what's important is that (to wingnuts) he doesn't seem like the kind of person who would consort with Freddie Mac. (But ... but ... he hates anything government! And quasi-governmental entities!)

But why does Gingrich get away with so many apostasies? Freddie Mac. Attacking Paul Ryan. Attacking Romney's Bain career. Doing that ad with Nancy Pelosi. Why isn't any of this politically fatal?

It's almost as if he and the base have an understanding -- base voters know he's going to cheat on them with another ideology, but he's just so good to them after that. In matters of the heart, a cad might come back home bearing flowers and expensive gifts and reservations for a romantic dinner. Gingrich just attacks Juan Williams and John King. And the base swoons! Oooh, what a hunk! Yes, he may run around, but when he comes home, there's nothing like his good lovin'.

(And feel free to flip the genders -- I'm sure there's a blues or '70s rock song that will fit this no matter which way you want to do the metaphor.)

2012-01-23T08:23:00.003-05:00

NOT BAD, MITT, BUT STILL A FEW ROUGH PATCHES

Mitt Romney attacked Newt Gingrich at a campaign rally in Florida yesterday, and he did an adequate job, but there are a few kinks to work out:

"We're not choosing a talk show host," Romney said, alluding to his rival's strong debate performances that helped shift momentum in his favor in South Carolina. "We're choosing the person who should be leader of the free world."

Really? "A talk show host"? I don't know about you, but when I hear that phrase, I think of, well, Oprah. Doesn't everyone on the planet think of Oprah? Is that really the analogy that conveys the essential Newtness of Newt? C'mon, Mitt -- at least make us think about Jerry Springer guests, or the interviewees on pro wrestling broadcasts. Tell the crowd we're electing a president, not electing a Trash-Talker-in-Chief. Tell 'em if we were electing a Trash-Talker-in Chief, hell, you'd vote for Gingrich. Just keeopp saying "Trash-Talker-in-Chief." Not "talk show host." A surprising number of Americans would like Oprah as president.

He went on to list what he described as the qualities of a leader: integrity, sobriety, judgment, thoughtfulness, reliability and high ethical standards.

President Romney will help little old ladies cross the street!

..."At the end of four years as speaker of the House, it was proven that he was a failed leader," Romney said.

And you were governor for, um, how long, Mitt? Four years?

"He had to resign in disgrace. I don't know whether you knew that.... His fellow Republicans -- 88% of his Republicans -- voted to reprimand Speaker Gingrich. He has not had a record of successful leadership."

Well, Republicans hate government, so being forced to resign from Congress might come off as kind of a good thing, no? I'm not sure this part of the attack connects.

But Romney sought to tie the 1990s ethics investigation to Gingrich's recent work as an advisor to mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. "He talks about great, bold movements and ideas -- well what’s he been doing for 15 years? He's been working as a lobbyist ... and selling influence around Washington."

No, no, no, Mitt. You're there, but you're still using too many words. Don't say, "He's been working as a lobbyist ... and selling influence around Washington." Say, "He's been a Washington lobbyist." Washington lobbyist. Washington lobbyist. Washington lobbyist. Never say it any other way.

Gingrich has insisted that he never worked as a lobbyist. But to cheers in Ormond Beach, Romney demanded a public review of Gingrich's "work product" as an advisor to Freddie Mac.

"Work product"? Seriously? Mitt, are you attacking a rival or filling out a form from HR?

"Because Freddie Mac figures in very prominently to the fact that people in Florida have seen home values go down. It's time to turn that around."

No! Not "figures very prominently"! Every Fox viewers knows that Freddie and Fannie are 100% responsible for the meltdown! They're the alpha and omega! There is no other culprit! (Oh, except Barney Frank. And Jimmy Carter. And ACORN. But don't say any of that! Keep it simple, stupid!)

Now, this, I think, works, if you're trying to win over wingnuts who are still angry at Jane Fonda (and, Mitt, you are):

At one point during his outdoor rally at a building supply company, Romney was interrupted by protesters chanting, "We are the people." He quickly dismissed them.

"No, actually, these are the people," Romney shouted back. "These are the people; you're the interrupters. We believe in the Constitution. We believe in the right to speech. And you believe in interrupting. Take a hike."

Romney's supporters drowned them out by chanting "U-S-A." ...

"I love these guys, by the way, who don't like America and our free-enterprise system, and they have something else in mind," he said. "Take a look at Cuba; take a look at North Korea; take a look at the former Soviet Union. Our system works. What they're fighting for does not work. I believe in America."

Although Romney's determination to shout down anyone who ever tries to interrupt him reminds me of this:

Hey, Mitt: If it comes off as "Shut up, hippie," you're golden. If it comes off as "whiny third grade pedant demanding that the teacher make everyone hew strictly to the rules," well, the voters are going to give you a wedgie.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-22T21:43:00.000-05:00

THE WEASEL WORDS THAT TELL US CHRISTIE REALLY WANTS TO BE VP

The main point of this story from The Hill is that Chris Christie, a Mitt Romney supporter and surrogate, went on Meet the Press and insulted Newt Gingrich ("This is a guy that's had a very difficult career at times and has been an embarrassment to the party") -- despite the fact that Gingrich appeared on the same Meet the Press broadcast, and despite the fact that Gingrich could be the presidential nominee of Christie's party. (The latter suggests to me that, as I've said before, the GOP establishment really might not back Gingrich if he's the nominee, treating him the way the party treated David Duke when he made it to the general election in the Louisiana governor's race years ago. The party might try to secure the Americans Elect line for an establishment Republican instead.)

But beyond that, there's a quote from Christie that's interesting if you think the man he's endorsed, Mitt Romney, is still a likely GOP nominee, although the Hill reporter draws exactly the wrong conclusion:

In the same interview Christie shot down the possibility of joining Romney on the Republican presidential ticket if the former Massachusetts governor won the nomination. He said he would listen if Romney offered him the job but, as of now, he plans to stick in his current job....

"I absolutely believe that come November 2012 I'm going to be governor of New Jersey," Christie said.

Excuse me, but that's a very clever weasel-word answer, for the simple reason that Christie's still going to be governor of New Jersey in November 2012 even if he's on the ticket and it wins, because he wouldn't be sworn in as VP until January 2013.

Say what you will about Christie, he's not Rick Perry -- I'm sure he knows exactly what he's saying when he says that. So, yeah, he wants it.

And if you doubt that, go to the transcript:

GOV. CHRISTIE: ... Now as for the vice presidency, let me say again, I want to be governor of New Jersey. I ran to be governor of New Jersey. I absolutely believe that come November 2012 I'm going to be governor of New Jersey and not in any other office. The fact of the matter is, if Governor Romney, who's going to be our nominee, picked up the phone and called me to talk about this, I love my country enough and I love my party enough to listen, but in the end, David, if you were a betting guy--and I know you are, I know you are, David. If you're a betting guy, you should bet Chris Christie being the governor of New Jersey in November 2012.

Well, I'd take that bet, just as I would have taken a bet that Joe Biden would still be the senior senator from Delaware in November 2008 -- just not two months later.

I think Christie's at the top of Romney's short list -- or he's trying to get there.

****

By the way, the exchange (with interviewer David Gregory) gets a bit sickening:

MR. GREGORY: But you said once, who would want me as a number two?

GOV. CHRISTIE: Well, I still feel that way.

MR. GREGORY: But you'd be a good vice president, wouldn't you?

GOV. CHRISTIE: Oh, listen, I think that certain personalities...

MR. GREGORY: Not to appeal to your ego or anything.

GOV. CHRISTIE: No, listen...

MR. GREGORY: I'm saying you'd be wonderful, wouldn't you?

"You'd be wonderful"? There's your liberal media, folks. I mean, yeah, he smiles when he says this -- watch it in the clip at about 9:00 -- but you tell me whether he's really joking.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

2012-01-22T14:03:00.001-05:00

BRING US TOGETHER? GINGRICH?

Here's an interesting point made by mistermix after he watch Newt Gingrich's victory speech -- interesting, but I don't quite buy it:

...if Newt is the candidate, he's going to drive the discussion into all the nooks and crannies of noise and diversion that have occupied Fox News viewers since Obama's victory. In other words, Newt is the candidate of the 2009 media cycle, where the Tea Party dominated media coverage. If Romney is the candidate, a big part of the discussion will be how he managed to pay 15% tax on the millions he made. He's the candidate of the 2011 media cycle, dominated by Occupy Wall Street and issues of jobs and equity.

Even though it would appear that Newt's candidacy is better for the establishment, establishment Republicans are going to try to snuff out his campaign ... what's so bad for the establishment about having a shit-slinger like Newt take attention away from the unfairness of eternal tax cuts? He guarantees that the issues of the election will all be sideshow trivia: Obama will be explaining why he isn't like Saul Alinsky, the media will be explaining why they aren't traitors, and Paul Krugman will be explaining what "fiat currency" means.

Yeah, but what the tea party, the Kochs, and Muroch/Ailes did in 2009-2010 was appropriate for winning a midterm election, not a presidential election. In a midterm election -- and this applies to Gingrich's own big win in 1994 -- you fire up the base and count on an especially diminished turnout by the other side (after all, lots of people just don't vote in midterms anyway). Anger works.

In a presidential election, you have to make voters in the middle think you're reasonable and the other guy is off base and extreme. Obama did that in '08. Clinton did it in '96. Obama can do it again -- though Romney is positioning himself so he can (gently) marginalize Obama. And the result is that people don't like Romney, but he still polls much better against Obama than Gingrich does (in fact, of the four remaining Republicans Romney polls best against Obama and Gingrichy polls worst.)

And presidential elections are personality-driven. Reagan was a red-meat partisan who made his backers hate liberals and Democrats, but he came off to a lot of people in the middle as a folksy grandpa. George W. Bush was a pretty nasty partisan himself, but he concealed his leanings to some extent in 2000 and wrapped his ideology in the flag in '04 to win over swing voters such as the "security moms," who thought he was just a patriotic Boy Scout selflessly protecting us from the evildoers. Hard to imagine Gingrich pulling anything like that off. I don't even think he can fake a message of "Bring Us Together" the way Nixon did in '68.

And as for Romney as plutocrat, well, I still say the American people are far less class-conscious than they ought to be. Even the people who are paying very little attention right now probably know that Romney is an ex-businessman, and if America were in sync with Occupy Wall Street, that alone would be killing him. But it isn't. We still love CEOs. We still think "job creators" might save us.

2012-01-22T08:15:00.000-05:00

GOP CRAZY BASE VOTERS THINK THE REST OF US ARE AS CRAZY AS THEY ARE

Yes, South Carolina Republican voters gave Newt Gingrich a decisive victory, but please note a particular reason they gave for picking Newt:

Of those who think beating Mr. Obama is the most important candidate quality, Mr. Gingrich wins nearly half of the votes, the most of any of the Republican candidates.

And voters in South Carolina were more likely than voters in New Hampshire to say that beating Mr. Obama was the most important quality in a Republican candidate.

Dave Weigel elaborates:

Forty-five percent of voters ranked "can defeat Obama" as the supremo quality they want in a nominee. Gingrich won them over Romney, 51-37. Why? Tony Shipley, a Tennessee state representative who runs Newt's campaign there, explained it to me. "He will LACERATE Obama in a debate. He will absolutely ANNIHILATE him."

So what these people are saying is that they think independents and even some Democrats will respond favorably in the fall if Newt Gingrich treats Barack Obama the way he treated Juan Williams and John King. They think going medieval on a guy a lot of people think is likable even though they don't agree with him personally is a winning strategy.

I have no desire to disabuse them of this notion. I hope they sustain it all the way to the convention, and beyond.

2012-01-21T17:39:00.000-05:00

FIGURES LIE AND CHARLES MURRAY FIGURES

Charles Murray has an article in The Wall Street Journal (adapted from his forthcoming book) in which he argues that there's a "new American divide" between cultural elitists and everyone else; everyone else, he says, is suffering because of this divide, and there's nothing government or corporations can do about it, because the big problem is that the cultural elites are so darn elitist. He describes the two American tribes as the elitist "Belmont" and the downscale "Fishtown":

If you were an executive living in Belmont in 1960, income inequality would have separated you from the construction worker in Fishtown, but remarkably little cultural inequality. You lived a more expensive life, but not a much different life. Your kitchen was bigger, but you didn't use it to prepare yogurt and muesli for breakfast. Your television screen was bigger, but you and the construction worker watched a lot of the same shows (you didn't have much choice). Your house might have had a den that the construction worker's lacked, but it had no StairMaster or lap pool, nor any gadget to monitor your percentage of body fat. You both drank Bud, Miller, Schlitz or Pabst, and the phrase "boutique beer" never crossed your lips.

Um, really? Didn't Hugh Hefner devote pretty much every non-naked page of Playboy back in 1960 to telling the (presumably) upscale reader of the magazine what high-end hooch to drink, what spiffy car to drive, what clothes would make women think he was James Bond, etc., etc.?

Ah, but you may be thinking, "Well, of course blue-collar and white-collar people were more alike half a century ago -- there wasn't as much of a wage gap!" Silly you, says Murray:

It's not that white working class males can no longer make a "family wage" that enables them to marry. The average male employed in a working-class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960.

Well, I'd like to see the source material for that assertion. All I can say is that it doesn't jibe with anything I've observed in America in my 52 years. This is what I've observed:

Once upon a time, a large number [of blue-collar and service workers] earned at least $20 an hour, or its inflation-adjusted equivalent, and now so many of them don't.

The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a marker, of sorts. And it is on its way to extinction....

That basic wage blossomed first in the auto industry in 1948....

The high point came in the 1970s.... Since then the percentage of people earning at least $20 an hour has eroded in every sector of the economy, falling last year to 18 percent of all hourly workers from 23 percent in 1979 -- a gradual unwinding of the post-World War II gains.

The decline is greatest in manufacturing, where only 1.9 million hourly workers still earn that much. That's down nearly 60 percent since 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

Oh, no, Murray says. We can't blame employers greed or government policies that favor the rich. It's all your fault, craft-beer-drinking scum. It's your fault the proles commit crimes and don't get married.

What's the solution?

You have to become a nation of people who wag your fingers like David Brooks!

There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need -- not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

Scold your inferiors! Yeah, that'll work!

2012-01-21T10:00:00.000-05:00

A BLIND ROMNEY FINDS A NUT

Mitt Romney is a much weaker natural politician than Newt Gingrich, but really, folks, Gingrich has only one strength, and Mitt Romney, after flailing around, has finally figured out how to combat it, apparently:

Mitt Romney leaves NBC Florida Republican debate uncertain

NBC is denying reports that it plans to cancel this Monday's GOP debate in Tampa Bay, Florida, because Mitt Romney has not yet committed to participating.....

But as of this afternoon, NBC has left the standard Monday program listings in place -- "Fear Factor" at 9 p.m. and "Rock Center" at 10 p.m. -- a decision the network attributs to an abundance of caution....

Campaign sources say they are unaware of any cancellation, but Romney's unwillingness to commit could leave the debate's status in question....

Debates are all Newt's got. If it's a TV-ad campaign (as Florida certainly will be without debates), Romney's going to outspend Gingrich and that will be that. And Gingrich makes a lot more mistakes when he's off the debate stage -- criticizing Paul Ryan, launching an attack on Romney as a capitalist -- that he does when he's on.

Sure, voters clamor for the red meat at the debates -- but will they miss them when they're gone? They've had twenty-three of these damn things already -- I really don't think they'll demand a twenty-fourth, even if Gingrich's campaign is chasing Romney around with a campaign staffer in a chicken suit. (There'll be pressure in the political media as well, and Romney might foolishly succumb to it, though if he does, he's a fool.)

But I'm wondering why the debate seems to be on the verge of being canceled altogether -- you know Gingrich and Paul, at least, are going to keep campaigning after South Carolina along with Romney. If you think these debates fulfill a civic duty to inform the public, why not just let Mitt and Ron (and perhaps Rick) go at it without Mitt? (And won't the ratings be good if the crazy GOP base anticipates more red meat from Newt?)

Well, maybe the GOP, in conjunction with the Romney campaign, has had the good sense to coordinate this: Mitt drops out of the debate and then the party, gently but firmly, urges NBC not to go forward. The party's leaders also must have finally figured out that this is how you shut down Gingrich.

There are, God help us, five more debates scheduled after the next one -- one in Florida at the end of the month, and four more in late February and March. All of those are co-sponsored by state Republican Party organizations or, in one case, by the Reagan Library. My guess is that these establishment types are all going to have the sudden revelation that debating time is over in their party. I think we'll see a wave of cancellations. Really, are these establishmentarians going to let Gingrich win it?

*****

UPDATE, SUNDAY: Never mind -- Romney will participate in both Florida debates. I think he's crazy. I think the GOP establishment is crazy. Just strong-arm the process, shut the damn things down, and let the anti-Romneys howl.

2012-01-20T22:00:00.000-05:00

A SHRINK'S DISPATCH FROM THE MURDOCH MINISTRY OF TRUTH

Keith Ablow is a right-wing psychiatrist who appears regularly on Fox News; he also co-authored a parenting book with Glenn Beck. Now he's written an opinion piece for FoxNews.com entitled -- wait for it -- "Newt Gingrich's Three Marriages Mean He Might Make a Strong President -- Really." Here's Ablow's reasoning -- and I hope you're sitting down for this:

1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.

2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.

3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.

Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we'll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

Yes, America, we all share their terrible taste in men!

Wait, there's more:

4) Two women -- Mr. Gingrich's first two wives -- have sat down with him while he delivered to them incredibly painful truths: that he no longer loved them as he did before, that he had fallen in love with other women and that he needed to follow his heart, despite the great price he would pay financially and the risk he would be taking with his reputation.

Conclusion: I can only hope Mr. Gingrich will be as direct and unsparing with the Congress, the American people and our allies. If this nation must now move with conviction in the direction of its heart, Newt Gingrich is obviously no stranger to that journey.

Wow. Just wow. Um, so does this mean that, after 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, when we felt the need to be merciless to foreign enemies, we should have elected a president who was a wife-killer?

Here's my question: Does Ablow actually believe any of this nonsense? Or are you just assigned to write pieces like this when you walk into the Fox News offices every day, the way Winston Smith gets assigned to rewrite stories for the newspapers of Oceania?

(Via Rod Dreher, who for all his faults, is also appalled.)

2012-01-20T17:21:00.002-05:00

WAIT -- THIS IS THE SLICK, PROFESSIONAL CAMPAIGN WITH THE EXPERIENCED CANDIDATE?

Just up at the Huffington Post (emphasis added):

In a radio interview with Sean Hannity on Friday, Mitt Romney floated several names of politicians who he believes would make good running mates for the eventual GOP presidential nominee.

When asked by Hannity who would make "anybody's short list," Romney ticked off the names of many Republican governors, including Brian Sandoval of Nevada, Susana Martinez of New Mexico, Chris Christie of New Jersey, Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Bob McDonnell of Virginia. He also named two former governors-- Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota....

Really, Mitt? Haley Barbour? A guy who's pardoned eight men who killed their wives or girlfriends, two of them earlier this month as part of a 215-person pardon-palooza that included 27 people convicted of murder or manslaughter? A guy who, now that he's left office, is moving back instantly to his former extremely lucrative career as a lobbyist, as well as a speaker earning five figures per corporate speech? You mentioned him today, Mitt?

And you're the "electable" Republican? The one with the best chance of winning?

2012-01-20T16:18:00.001-05:00

THE THINGS YOU THINK ARE PRECIOUS I CAN'T UNDERSTAND

Just the description of the following clip will be enough to tell you how obnoxious it is:

Appearing at a Winthrop University panel Thursday, MSNBC host and NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd ripped into Stephen Colbert and his not-yet-official run, suggesting that Colbert might have some ulterior motives in the way he’s almost throwing his hat into the GOP primary ring:
"Is it fair to the process? Yes, the process is a mess, but he's doing it in a way that it feels as if he's trying to influence it with his own agenda, that may be anti-Republican. And we in the media are covering it as a schtick and a satire, but it’s like, 'Well wait a minute here...' he's also trying to do his best to marginalize the candidates, and we're participating in that marginalization."

Todd said that the "mainstream media" (his quotes) has a responsibility to exercise some caution and question what Colbert's agenda is. "Is it to educate the public about the dangers of money in politics and what's going on?" He asked, "or is it simply to marginalize the Republican party? I think if I were a Republican candidate, I'd be concerned about that."

But you have to watch this clip all the way to the end to appreciate the full extent of its awfulness -- you have to get to the part where Todd says:

... I worry we're going to trivialize our institutions, make people more cynical, raise an entire generation that's even more cynical than they are now, to the point where we have already demonized institutions that, frankly, I do idolize. I idolize the institution of the United States Senate and the United States House. I'm sorry that there are a lot of people there that don't idolize that the same way.

OK, fine, Chuck -- I understand having reverence for what our institutions of government have been at their best, and over our entire history. But you idolize them now? You idolize Congress as it exists today? If so, you're nuts.

And I'm not sure how on earth this connects to Stephen Colbert mocking the 2012 presidential election, which now features four Republicans and one Democrat, three of whom used to be in Congress and aren't anymore, and one of whom has never been in Congress. But no, that's a separate point -- somehow, according to Todd, if voters take a comedy candidacy seriously, and prefer to vote for the comic rather than for any of the "serious" candidates, it's the comic's fault, even though the comic is just tapping into a disillusionment that already exists.

And no, I don't know how the hell Todd arrives at the conclusion that Colbert can possibly marginalize an entire major political party just by making jokes about it.

Todd concludes by saying:

But I also think that this ideological fight sometimes between the two parties is a good thing for the system. You know, yes, we're still trying to figure out how to cover it in this new way of covering things, and I think the minute-by-minute certainly isn't healthy for the system. But over time it has worked, and you know, I just worry about this overparodizing [sic] of the process, where -- and we wonder -- we complain now that we feel like the most qualified people decide not to run because they don't want to be the butt of jokes. Well, I think this is going to exasperate [sic] the process.

Oh, right. It's not the endless need to fundraise; it's not the super PAC corruption; it's not the Fox-fueled, talk-radio-fueled ideological war to the death that takes place as our country goes down the crapper -- no, none of that is why "the most qualified people" won't run, according to Chuck Todd. The reason is one guy who tells jokes. Colbert's the whole problem.

(Clip via Huffington Post.)

2012-01-20T11:51:00.000-05:00

THEY WANNA KILL SOMETHING

I've seen versions of this image for the past forty years. It's a classic bit of pop culture:

And it's basically the way Republican voters feel right now (and pretty much all the time), which is why Newt Gingrich is doing so well, and Mitt Romney isn't.

Steve Kornacki explains why Gingrich's attack on CNN's John King for a question about Newt's ex-wife was such a hit with the debate crowd last night:

It's no mystery why the audience of Republicans so instinctively and passionately rallied to Gingrich's defense. His final line was the key: that the liberal media is out to get Republicans and will stop at nothing to destroy them is an absolute article of faith on the right....

What Gingrich did brilliantly on Thursday night is to articulate this paranoid victimhood in a clear and compelling (for his audience, at least) way. It's the same basic trick he pulled in this week's other debate, when he connected with another strain of the persecution complex: that honest, tax-paying Republicans are the victims of a dependency class of poor people and minorities that Democrats intentionally enable. Thus did Monday's crowd rejoice when Gingrich insisted to Fox News' Juan Williams that there was nothing remotely insulting about his statement that the NAACP should be asking for paychecks instead of food stamps, or his suggestion that children in poor neighborhoods don’t understand the value of work.

Kornacki doesn't say it outright, so I will: Yes, the "liberal media" is a favorite wingnut target, but the key here is that he attacked the media head-on, face-to-face, on both occasions. (In the case of Williams, he was also attacking a black man head-on after that black man talked about racism -- very satisfying.) This debate is supposed to be part of a process of choosing a president who'll take the oath of office next year, but Republican voters have no patience -- they want to kill something now.

Gingrich did that. In each case, he had a "liberal media" guy sitting right in front of him and he whaled on him.

This is what Mitt Romney doesn't do when he talks about his wealth and his business career and his taxes -- as I said earlier this morning, the voters have his back on this to some extent, but what they want him to do is use questions about his money as an opportunity to kill something, now.

They don't want him to say, Look, Obama's going to engage in class war eventually, so don't you guys up here on the stage with me help him do that, which is his basic message on this. They want him to find someone to pound on immediately.

What Romney needs to do is turn the question on the questioner and say, "You are engaging in class warfare just by asking me this, you liberal media commie scumbag. You are the problem. You hate freedom."

C'mon, Mitt -- don't delay their gratification!

(Kornacki link via Steve Benen. X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-20T08:09:00.002-05:00

RIGHT NOW, ROMNEY CAN'T WIN FOR LOSING

I missed most of last night's debate, but I just watched the full-six minute clip of the candidates being asked about releasing their tax returns. Number of time Mitt Romney gets a round of applause? Six. Number of times he's booed? Once, briefly, and by only a few people.

Headline? "Republican Debate Audience Boos Mitt Romney Over Releasing Tax Returns."

Don't misjudge what's going on from the headline. These voters don't have any problem whatsoever with his wealth, or however he made it -- they just want to nominate they believe will kick ass mercilessly in November.

Watch the clip. Romney gets a bit of applause around 1:46 when he attacks Obama for playing golf. Bizarrely, he gets another round of applause starting at 2:50 when he says, "I obviously pay all full taxes. I'm honest in my dealings with people. People understand that." (Really? That's an applause line to Republicans?) One or two people actually clap when, in response to being asked whether he'll release tax returns for multiple years, he says, "Maybe" (4:34) -- though the boos and catcalls start a few seconds later. But then he gets a big round of applause (5:01) when he says, "I know the Democrats want to go after the fact that I've been successful. I'm not going to apologize for being successful." And then there's another round of applause (5:31) when he says, "What I have, I earned." And another one starts just as the clip ends (5:52), when he says -- well, this is from the transcript:

And I'm going to be able -- I'm going to be able to talk to President Obama in a way no one else can that's in this race right now, about how the free economy works, what it takes to put Americans back to work, and make sure he understands that this divisiveness and dividing Americans between 99 and 1 is dangerous. We are one nation under God. (Cheers, applause.)

Republicans have no problem whatsoever with Romney being a rich guy who pays low taxes and denies that we have a society with two sets of economic rules. They even like his ability to mythologize and romanticize capitalism (and himself as a capitalist). But they want a guy they feel certain is going to be able to grind Barack Obama into the dust. They fear Romney could be vulnerable -- vulnerable to the hated Obama -- and they want reassurance that he isn't. That's it.

2012-01-20T06:44:00.000-05:00

0 FOR THE DAY

I caught the Gingrich story yesterday, got distracted by other obligations and missed the mood of the reaction (especially the GOP mood), then caught only a few minutes of the debate and missed the rest. I basically had a Rick Perry day, blogwise. I'll try to clean up the damage and start fresh today.

2012-01-19T22:51:00.000-05:00

SPOTTED WHILE STANDING IN LINE AT DUANE READE

This magazine cover. I've highlighted what caught my eye:

Sigh. This is how we do class consciousness in America.

2012-01-19T20:14:00.001-05:00

UM, NEVER MIND

CNN's John King just opened with a question to Newt about Marianne Gingrich and Gingrich is tearing King a new one, to multiple ovations. So ignore what I just wrote. And GOP? More debates = ascendant Newt. Fewer debates = declining Newt. It's really simple. Do you want him to go away or not?

... Or maybe it's just another drunken tailgate party. They're cheering Romney, for heaven's sake. (On capitalism, sure, but still -- Romney!)

2012-01-19T19:16:00.003-05:00

CUE THE '70S PR0N GUITARS

British right-wing apparatchik Toby Harnden thinks the ABC interview in which Newt Gingrich's second wife says he wanted an "open marriage" might actually help Newt's candidacy:

... Driving down to Charleston from Columbia for tonight's debate, I tuned into talk radio giants Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Both were railing against ABC and the mainstream media for what in their view is a cynically-timed hit job on Gingrich designed to smear a Republican candidate.... Sarah Palin came onto the Hannity show to make a similar point.

Both Limbaugh (who married his fourth wife in 2010) and Hannity (a once-married Catholic) declared Gingrich's personal life to be essentially off bounds, partly because it's ancient history and partly because, Hannity argued, Democrats like Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson and John Edwards were, to varying degrees, given passes by the liberal media....

Um, yeah -- except that three of those four Democrats never even came particularly close to winning the party's presidential nomination. Two of those three had their political careers permanently ruined by the sex charges. In Jackson's case, most Americans probably don't even know about the infidelity -- even Republicans have never made a big deal of it. The one Democrat on that list who got away with cheating did so in large part because his one and only wife never stopped supporting him.

Dave Weigel also thinks Newt might skate, also citing talk radio, as well as a couple of voters he met in South Carolina:

... "Everybody's had an angry ex-spouse!" said Limbaugh. Callers agreed with him, assuming that Marianne Gingrich was embittered and not to be trusted. "When a horse is dead, you dismount," suggested one Dittohead.

Limbaugh was only echoing a sentiment you can hear in the Republican base. There's still a sense, among some conservatives, that Herman Cain was unfairly brought down by lying, gold-digging women.

Um, yeah -- but Cain is out of the race, isn't he? Nobody forced GOP voters to abandon him. I once thought they might stand by him, but they didn't, did they.

Weigel quotes two voters -- both male, by the way, as are the talk show hosts quoted (maleness, of course, is a trait shared by only half of Republican voters):

"It's so old," grumbled Bert Benton, an accountant and self-described Reagan Democrat. "If she felt like this, so strongly, she could have talked about it months ago." (Note: She actually did, in an Esquire profile of the candidate.) "It's just like what happened to Herman Cain, or when someone has a relationship and then five years later says 'I was raped.'"

Jim Anthony, a probable Ron Paul voter who walked the rally with a "NO ROMNEY" sign ("he's soulless," he explained), flirted with the idea of approaching Gingrich in the receiving line and joking about the story -- "ask him, any advice for an open relationship?" But he decided against it. "It'd be tacky." Who cared about the story, anyway?

Um, yeah -- but those don't seem like the voters Gingrich has to worry about. Public Policy Polling did the first night of a tracking poll in South Carolina last night, and Gingrich led Romney 34%-28% -- pre-interview. A significant point here about Gingrich's voter base:

...he even has a 37-20 advantage with evangelicals.

The people he has to worry about are voters like this woman, who was featured in a story by Melissa Block on NPR last night:

BLOCK: Back at Gingrich headquarters, Sondra Ziegler steps into the kitchen to talk about her commitment as a conservative evangelical Christian to Newt Gingrich. After all, he's the candidate who, if you believe the negative ads, carries more baggage than the airlines. And she says his admitted infidelities and multiple marriages did give her pause.

ZIEGLER: You know, I think his is a story of redemption. And if he's asked forgiveness from God -- and I believe he has -- and if he's made peace with the people in his life that were hurt by that, then I don't know what more I can ask.

This is a home-schooler who traveled with her young kids all the way to South Carolina from Lubbock, Texas, to work for Gingrich. Think she's a tad disillusioned now that she knows that he hasn't made peace with all the people he hurt? And if she's too dug in to abandon Gingrich, what about the other Bible-thumpers he's attracted?

I'm no evangelical -- but I was a Catholic, and I know what Christianity teaches about God's forgiveness having the ability to wipe the slate clean. Yesterday, if you wanted to believe Gingrich was a godly man, you could tell yourself the slate was wiped clean. Today, not so much.

Also, "open marriage" is pretty '70s-sounding, no? It reeks of the post-'60s sexual revolution -- and you know how wingers feel about the '60s. If I were Romney's super Pac, I'd do an ad with wah-wah guitar music and Newt sporting a Harry Reems mustache. If the campaign bus is rockin', don't bother knockin'!

2012-01-19T07:50:00.000-05:00

IF TEAM ROMNEY IS DOING THIS TO NEWT, WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO OBAMA? (And maybe to the country?)

Well, I have a few minutes here, and this is happening, so I'll just throw in my two cents (warning: links to Drudge and AP via Breitbart):

NEWT EX-WIFE UNLOADS ON CAMERA; NETWORK DEBATES 'ETHICS' OF AIRING BEFORE SC PRIMARY

Marianne Gingrich has said she could end her ex-husband's career with a single interview.

Earlier this week, she sat before ABCNEWS cameras, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

She spoke to ABCNEWS reporter Brian Ross for two hours, and her explosive revelations are set to rock the trail.

But now a "civil war" has erupted inside of the network, an insider claims, on exactly when the confession will air! ...

UPDATE: The AP reports ABC is now likely to air the segment Thursday on NIGHTLINE.

Mitt Romney himself may be Thurston Howell III at times, but Team Romney is really good at this thug stuff. Team Romney (which I'm defining as the insiders and outsiders on Mitt's side) got this to happen at just the right time.

Team Romney is better at this than Team McCain. The GOP primaries this year are much uglier than the 2008 edition.

And as nasty as McCain and his surrogates were in the general election, mostly, after the Jeremiah Wright moment, it was McCarthyism and insinuations -- there was less digging up of actual dirt than you'd have expected.

With Gingrich, of course (and with Herman Cain before him), there was a lot to dig up, obviously. In a general election, things would be different. Right-wingers make crazy insinuations about Obama's college transcripts and birth certificate fakery; they talk of multiple Social Security numbers and drug-fueled gay liaisons. But in reality, there's no there there.

However, if there's anything anywhere, Team Romney's going to use it. Team Romney's not going to leave any ammunition unused. One thing that is sincere about Mitt Romney is that he has genuinely angry moments -- and I think this kind of campaigning really appeals to the angry side of him.

I don't think he's merely Poppy Bush, who sicced Lee Atwater on Michael Dukakis because he grew up the kind of preppy who played everything, including horseshoes, to win, but then governed with relative mildness by Republican standards (at least if you weren't a dictator overseas who looked at him crosswise).

I think Romney is a bit Nixonian -- he's got some of the same social awkwardness and some of the same anger. But he has the elite scion's desire to be (or at least seem) above the fray; he's not going to mire himself in the dirty work.

So he won't be Nixon if he wins, but he won't be Obama, either. If he gets that much power and you stand in his way, things might get ugly.

****

(And now I'll see you this evening or tomorrow....)

2012-01-18T22:00:00.000-05:00

I probably won't be able to do a lot of posting tomorrow (Thursday).

I know I didn't ask in advance, but if anyone who has keys to the place wants to post something while I'm preoccupied, feel free....

2012-01-18T17:16:00.000-05:00

IS MITT ROMNEY MAKING AMERICA MORE CLASS-CONSCIOUS THAN OCCUPY WALL STREET DID?

Occupy Wall Street did an amazing job of getting America to start talking about economic inequality, and about the way the game is rigged for the rich and big corporations -- but after that first moment, when the movement still had everyone's attention, its members made a conscious decision not to get specific about positions and goals and critiques. I think a real opportunity was lost.

But now I feel that the Mitt Romney campaign has the potential to start a discussion about the specific ways the rich get richer, a discussion that will be heard even in the heartland, and even by low-information voters -- the very discussion Occupy didn't quite initiate.

Romney's doing this by being embarrassed about his wealth, and by releasing information about his financial situation in ways that draw attention to just what he's embarrassed about. He won't release his tax returns, then he says he will eventually, and meanwhile he blurts out that his tax rate is 15 percent, far less than the rate paid by many middle-class people. And now his reluctance to be more forthcoming, combined with what we know about his financial circumstances, leads a lot of people to speculate that he's offshoring his wealth. And on and on.

He's drawing attention to what the 1% can do with their money and the 99% can't. He's getting us down to cases on this.

And his shame is what's shining a light on this -- really, all he had to do was schedule the document dump for 5:30 on a Friday before a holiday weekend and only a few green-eyeshade journalists and bloggers would have really focused on what his disclosure revealed. Oh, sure, there'd be nuggets for opposition researchers to mine, but there wouldn't be this sense of shame. He could brazen his way through most attacks.

And now even his ideological soul mates are drawing attention to his shame. Chris Christie, who's endorsed him, says he should make his tax returns public. David Brooks is drawing attention to the shame by taking the opposite tack: he's being incredibly defensive on the candidate's behalf.

Some excerpts from Mr. Brooks' side in his new back and forth on the matter with Gail Collins:

David: ... Why do we make candidates release their tax forms? Has there ever been a case where a presidential decision has been influenced by some bit of information that might appear on a tax form? I doubt it. Has information on a tax form ever influenced anybody’s vote? Never heard of such a case....

David: My own view is that the desire for full disclosure stems from a few things. First, pure prurience. Second, members of what used to be called the New Class perpetually labor under the delusion that other people dislike the rich as much as they do and if they can only disclose that someone is rich that will end their political chances. Third, there is a misbegotten ideology haunting the land, the ideology of sunshinism. This is the belief that everything should be made public....

David: It also destroys people’s faith in government. Have you noticed that as democracy has become more open, cynicism has skyrocketed and the effectiveness of government has gone down the toilet? Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has the best observation on this — that parts of government should be hidden for the same reason middle-aged people should wear clothes.
Indeed, because those millions in Super-PAC bucks are just so open and transparent.

I actually think Brooks has a point at the beginning of this -- I can't think of a financial disclosure that actually affected the outcome of an election. We're just not a class-conscious society.

But that's precisely the reason why Romney shouldn't be so ashamed -- and that's why his shame has the potential to make Americans focus on the way rich people operate in this society in a way no other financial disclosure has. Mitt may be making us class-conscious, at last. Maybe we ought to thank him.

2012-01-18T13:36:00.002-05:00

BETTER TO TRAVEL ANGRILY THAN TO ARRIVE

I know that Mitt Romney looks like a weak candidate right now, but he's still awfully close to Obama even in that new Public Policy Polling survey, and I think even people who see him as hopeless and pathetic will agree that he's the most electable candidate the Republicans have. (No, I'm not counting Ron Paul because I think the vast majority of Americans don't know how many government programs he'd like to eliminate and what was written in his newsletters.) My point is that if the Republicans want to win, you'd think they'd be circling the wagons around him, maximizing his strengths, working to downplay his weaknesses, and attacking his critics. (And, while they're at it, putting a stop to the endless series of debates.)

But they're not doing any of this. Sarah Palin, as you probably know, wants the GOP fight to continue:

"I want to see this thing continue because iron sharpens iron, steel sharpens steel," Ms. Palin said.... "These guys are getting better in their debates, they're getting more concise, they're getting more grounded in what their beliefs are and articulating what their ideas are to get the country back on the right track and get Americans working again."

Rupert Murdoch publicly vented his frustration with Romney in a tweet after Monday's debate:

@rupertmurdoch: When will Romney get a manager to prepare him? Fancy not being ready for questions about taxes or felons! Damaging.

That's mild -- but should the de facto head of the GOP's media office say such things out loud?

And the rubes may be responding:

It's one poll from a short time period, but a new Rasmussen national survey shows former House Speaker Newt Gingrich making a big move in the Republican primary race compared to his latest performances in public polls. The new Ras, a snap poll conducted Tuesday, shows Gingrich just three points behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who leads the sample with 30 percent.

The one major change in the race was Gingrich’s impressive performance in Monday night's debate in South Carolina....

A couple of things are going on. One is that Republicans really do believe their own BS: Rush Limbaugh says on a regular basis that it's hardcore conservatism that wins elections, and I guess a lot of Republicans actually believe it. They fear Romney can't win because he's not wingnutty enough. (Maybe they think the public would prefer Gingrich, notwithstanding the 60% unfavorable rating he has in that PPP poll.)

Another factor, I think, is that Republicans simply enjoy conflict. We've seen this from the new teabaggers in the House this past year: Democrats have tried to compromise with them, but they don't seem to want to take yes for an answer. Part of this is ideological purism, obviously, but I think to some extent they just like fighting.

This is almost a powdered-drug way of thinking: It's as if the Republicans like the rush so much (Newt just said "food stamps" again! Booyah!) that they don't care if the end result in November is a nasty crash.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-18T11:25:00.001-05:00

DISTURBING TWEET OF THE DAY

From Chuck Todd:

Hmmm ... a bunch of white people get liquored up, then give a standing ovation to a guy who attacks food stamps -- in South Carolina. Gosh, what could go wrong there?

2012-01-18T08:27:00.002-05:00

NEWT GINGRICH, CHAMPION OF RACIAL RECONCILIATION!

According to The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, Newt Gingrich is one of the great heroes in recent American racial history:

Next to the election of a black president, we'd say that Gingrich's standing O was the most compelling dramatization of racial progress so far this century.

This reads like something Taranto wrote to win a bet ("A hundred bucks says I can make a semi-convincing case that Newt Gingrich should be as much of a hero to African Americans as Barack Obama"), but no, he's serious.

It takes him a long time to work through this bit of sophistry, however. The road goes through Sunday's New York Times, specifically that preposterous op-ed in which Lee Siegel claimed that Mitt Romney is "the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory." Taranto:

Siegel conflates Romney's ideological criticism of Obama with "whiteness":
While Mr. Romney may, in some people's eyes, be a non-Christian, he is better than any of his opponents at synching his worldview with that of the evangelicals. He likes to present, with theological urgency, a stark choice between, in his words, President Obama's "entitlement society" and the true American freedom of an "opportunity society." ...

In this way, whether he means to or not, Mr. Romney connects with a central evangelic fantasy: that the Barack Obama years, far from being the way forward, are in fact a historical aberration, a tear in the white space-time continuum.

Armed with this, Taranto is off to (as it were) the races:

Siegel's implicit notion that only whites are capable of benefiting from economic freedom under a regime of legal equality amounts to an insidious theory of racial supremacy.

That is the idea that Newt Gingrich repudiated in answer to Juan Williams's (not particularly objectionable) question. That is what brought the crowd to their feet.

How do I even begin to unpack this?

We've had horrible racism in America, as well as a class war.

We used to have economic mobility (for whites) in this country. We used to have an expanding pie for the (white) non-rich. We started offering more legal opportunity to non-whites at just about the time the pie of the non-rich stopped expanding. So yeah, James, certain people are more capable of benefiting "under a regime of legal equality" than others, because they have a massive head start, economic opportunity isn't expanding, and schools and job prospects are getting worse in non-rich neighborhoods (which are frequently but not exclusively non-white).

Taranto thinks that if you don't believe everyone in America has equal opportunity right now -- or would have it if we could just rid the government and the country of all these damn socialists -- you're the racist. We passed a bunch of civil rights laws, and now all we need is economic libertarianism and there'll be no racism in America.

And that, he says, is what those racially enlightened South Carolina Republicans were cheering, Go bless their formerly racist but now 100% non-prejudiced hearts:

The people who stood and cheered as the former speaker forcefully defended the freedom of "every American of every background" were mostly white members of today's Republican Party in the state that started the Civil War and later produced "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman and Strom Thurmond. That it was Martin Luther King Day was lagniappe.

Translation: the only non-racist way to help non-whites who lack economic opportunity is not to try to help them at all. The only racists in America are those who want to do something about racism. The invisible hand is the real Martin Luther King.

2012-01-17T17:29:00.003-05:00

HEY, MR. PRESIDENT: WHY NOT DEBATE NEWT ANYWAY?

Back when he and a fair number of other people thought he had a good chance of being this year's GOP presidential nominee, Newt Gingrich challenged President Obama to a series of Lincoln-Douglas-style debates, He continues to issue that challenge, though now, of course, it seems moot -- but Gingrich can still dream, can't he? Here's his new ad:

Adam Serwer writes:

Newt Gingrich has turned his Monday night debate exchange with Juan Williams on food stamps and the black community into a campaign ad, titled "The Moment."

... The ad begins with the question, "Who can beat Obama?" The ad is betting that Republicans are longing to see Gingrich lecture the first black president on how there's nothing racist about suggesting black people would rather be on public assistance than work for a living. It indulges two longstanding Republican fantasies: That Obama is an intellectual lightweight dependent on his teleprompter who would be easily dispatched by a knowledgeable conservative opponent, and that racism on the right is entirely an invention of liberals, who are the real racists.

Really? If given the chance in a debate, Gingrich would do his "food stamp president" riff to President Obama's face?

If that's the case, I think the president should agree to debate Gingrich no matter where he finishes in the GOP field. Do you think Gingrich would say no? And isn't it likely that, having telegraphed this racist punch for months, he actually would deliver it in a debate with Obama, to the horror of every non-racist in America, and having given Obama and his campaign months to prepare for it?

If Gingrich actually got his debate with Obama and made plans to say this, he may as well show up in a sheet and a hood. He'll utterly disgrace himself and the GOP. It would be a tremendous boost for Obama. Which is why Obama should get back to Gingrich and say, "Bring it on."

2012-01-17T15:41:00.001-05:00

LUCKY IN HIS ENEMIES

Imagine what Barack Obama's reelection chances would be like if anyone actually liked any of the Republican candidates -- I'm thinking of the new Public Policy Polling national survey, which has Obama leading Mitt Romney by 5, crushing him among independents, and beating all the Non-Mitts by even greater margins.

But what makes me a little queasy is how close these head-to-heads with Obama are considering the unpopularity of the Republicans. A whole lot of people are saying they'll vote for Republicans they don't even like. Look at the PPP numbers (PDF): Romney's favorability is 35%, but he gets 44% of the vote against Obama. Gingrich: favorability 26%, vote against Obama 42%. Paul: favorability 27%, vote against Obama 42%. Perry: favorability 21%, vote against Obama 40%.

I assume the GOP candidates have low approval (and quite high disapproval) because they're fighting with one another viciously and are making themselves and one another look bad. But that's going to stop soon -- quite possibly once this month is over. Won't Romney, as the survivor, see his approval go up? And if this many people are willing to vote for him now when they don't even like him, what happens if the public starts to dislike him less?

****

Ah, but the Obama campaign will go after Romney next. Also, Romney keeps making himself look bad. And that really might be enough to finish him off.

I see that Romney, under pressure, is promising to release his tax returns soon, and has declared that his effective tax rate is 15%. That's what you pay when what you make is mostly capital gains and carried interest rather than a salary or wages for actual labor. Yeah, it's likely that a number of people are going to feel some resentment on hearing this.

Via Scott Lemieux, I see that Rick Perlstein has written a column for Rolling Stone about Romney's lack of authenticity; in it Perlstein says this about Mitt:

He’s still inauthentic -- but with, I think, an exception. Every time he opens his mouth on the subject of capitalism, he says what he sincerely believes, which happens to fit neatly with present-day Republican ideology: that rich people deserve every penny they have, and if people complain about anything rich people do, it's only because they’re envious.

Well, yes, he seems authentic in those moments, but he seems embarrassed, and defensive, about his wealth, and about wealth in general. He didn't want to release his tax forms. He tries to dress down. He boasts about being a bargain shopper. He lashed out when he was criticized for saying corporations are people.

I think he should just take this high-end lemon and make gourmet lemonade out of it. Ditch the open-collar shirts and Gap jeans and Trump it up in expensive suits. Say, "Yes, I worked hard, and I've done well, and hey -- I want everyone in America to do well!" This is a contrarian argument I make all the time, but I think if Romney were big pimpin', and were a happy warrior for capitalism rather than a guy who reflexively defends capitalism when forced and then regrets it, he'd be doing better right now than he is.

What's weird about Romney is that he's so ashamed of what he actually is that he may as well be a Democrat. When you paint him into a corner and make him talk about capitalism he's sincerely in favor of it, but he tries to avoid talking about it. He treats capitalism the way Democrats tend to treat liberalism. I still think he'd make surprising gains if he were just brazenly plutocratic, because Americans still aren't developing real class consciousness, they just see the flop sweat when Romney blurts out his true feelings about wheeling and dealing.

2012-01-17T12:00:00.000-05:00

WILL THE PRESS UN-GORE MITT ROMNEY?

A lot of people are assuming that Mitt Romney is going to have some trouble in the general election because the mainstream press has decided he's the new Al Gore. See, for instance, Dana Milbank:

Romney, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg argued this week, has an "authentic inauthenticity problem."

And that is precisely why his struggle is so familiar. He is the political reincarnation of Al Gore, whose campaign I covered with an equal amount of cringing a dozen years ago.

To see Romney, in his Gap jeans, laughing awkwardly at his own jokes and making patently disingenuous claims, brings back all those bad memories of 2000: "Love Story." Inventing the Internet. Earth tones. Three-button suits. The alpha male in cowboy boots. The iced-tea defense. The Buddhist temple. The sighing during the debate.

But are we sure this is going to stick? It's true that every so often the press decides that a Democrat is the cool one and the Republicans are the clowns -- but that usually requires a Republican foil who's perceived as a massive screw-up (Poppy Bush going into '92, Gingrich going into '96, W going into 2008). Republicans are destroying America and running a do-nothing, all-stonewall Congress, but they don't have an aura of failure, exactly -- nihilism, yes, but not failure.

Without something like that, doesn't the Republican presidential candidate generally get the benefit of the doubt? See, e.g., 1988, 2000, 2004?

I think Romney is slowly going to be un-Gored by the media. I think the un-Gore-ing is going to read something like the second paragraph of this David Brooks passage from today:

Mitt Romney is never going to be confused for Pericles on the stump. Every sigh and utterance is prescripted, so watching his rallies is like watching the 19,000th performance of the road show of "Cats." And he has terrible reaction responses. When somebody else is talking and he means to show agreement, he mugs like someone from a bad silent movie. His wife, Ann, is much warmer and more natural on stage.

But Romney's awkwardness seems to endear him to audiences, because he's trying so hard. He spends an enormous amount of time after the speeches shaking hands, taking pictures and holding babies. Beads of sweat form on his forehead as he throws himself graciously into the crowds. He also has a nice startle response. When something unexpected happens, his face lights up and you get a burst of happy humanity out of him.

Translation: Yeah, he's awkward, but underneath that he's a real person! And there's actually something kind of appealing about his style -- he's not slick! He's not one of those political slicksters! Not like certain Kenyan Muslim socialists I could name! He's just a sincere guy trying to do the best he can without the natural gifts slick pols use to pull the wool over our eyes!

Maybe this won't happen. Maybe the press will continue to think Romney is Gore; maybe the press still thinks Obama is LeBron. But I don't think the latter has been true for a long time. And while Maureen Dowd can write a year's worth of columns based on the premise that both of these guys are pathetic (Dowd on Sunday: "If Obama is Spock, Romney is the Tin Man"), the rest of the Beltway press usually needs one winner and one loser. I wouldn't bet the house on Obama getting the winner slot.

(Milbank via DougJ. X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-17T08:44:00.002-05:00

WOULD IT HELP IF WE HAD JUNGLE PRIMARIES?

I know there are a lot of reasons to be wary of California-style "jungle primaries," in which parties don't pick nominees and all candidates for office run against one another, with the top two vote-getters going on to the general election, regardless of party -- you'll rarely see minor-party candidates on a general election ballot; the candidates who emerge might be just as unrepresentative as those emerging from the traditional process; and so on.

But if we eliminated party primaries in our presidential election campaigns, and just had one big nationwide, non-partisan primary campaign to pick two general election candidates, maybe one entire party's set of candidates wouldn't feel compelled to respond to Martin Luther King Day like this:

On a day set aside to honor civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., Mitt Romney plans to tout his extreme immigration positions during a campaign stop in South Carolina today -- with Kris Kobach, the author of Arizona's and Alabama's immigration laws, at his side....

Kobach even once wrote a book opposing the anti-Apartheid boycott of South Africa....

And this:

In fact, Mr. Gingrich won some of his loudest and most sustained applause when the liberal Fox News analyst Juan Williams pressed him on his call for schoolchildren to work as janitors, for his description of Mr. Obama as a "food stamp president" and remarks that Mr. Williams said, to loud boos, seemed "intended to belittle the poor."

At one point rolling his eyes, cocking his head to the side and saying with mock impatience, "Well, first of all, Juan," Mr. Gingrich seemed to revel in using Mr. Williams as a foil.

"The fact is more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history," Mr. Gingrich said, a claim that is numerically true but ignored the depth of the recession that Mr. Obama inherited when he took office. "I know that among the politically correct, you're not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable."

And this:

In a debate that fell on Martin Luther King's Birthday, the Republicans also found themselves arguing about whether convicted felons should be able to regain the right to vote when they have completed their prison sentences and parole. The issue has long been of concern to black leaders, given the disproportionate number of African-American men who serve prison terms.

Mr. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, said he thought they should regain voting rights under those conditions, defending a position he had taken in the Senate. Mr. Romney, after considerable pushing by Mr. Santorum, said he thought that violent felons should never regain the right to vote.

At that moment, Mr. Santorum -- who appeared to have anticipated what Mr. Romney was going to say -- responded by asking why as governor of Massachusetts he never did anything to deal with a state law that permitted felons to vote even while they were on parole.

What if Barack Obama had to compete for a spot in the non-partisan primary? What if he had to be at the debates? In other words, what if everyone and not just Republicans had reason to watch these debates? Would the candidates try so hard to appeal to the basest instincts of white voters?

I know Obama would be all but assured of winning one slot, and the competition would be for the other slot, and thus for Republican voters. But I'm not sure the press would believe that -- just to keep it interesting, they'd speculate about whether Obama could lose to both Ron Paul and another Republican, or Huntsman and another Republican, the way they're still speculating about a challenger stopping or slowing Romney.

I don't want to be some dewy-eyed naif believing that some change in our system -- especially one that will never actually happen -- could instantly sprinkle Magic Comity Dust all over American politics. But even with my low expectations of the GOP, I find that its meanness and contempt grind me down. Even I find myself capable of entertaining unrealistic fantasies of a way out.

America isn't as racist as this sliver of America seems to be. America isn't as mean-spirited and hate-filled in general. What if Republican candidates had to aim their campaign at America from Day One? Would it make any difference? Or am I just succumbing to sentiment?

2012-01-16T20:55:00.001-05:00

ALLEN WEST: DON'T PLAY THE RACE CARD, DEMOCRATS -- THAT'S MY JOB

African-American teabag congressman Allen West of Florida writes on his Facebook page:

Mr. President, please don't play the race card in 2012

... why is it that we continue to hear charges of racism emanating from the left, and most disturbingly, from the White House itself? It seems anytime there is criticism of the President or any of his black members of his administration, such as Attorney General Eric Holder, that criticism is decried as racist.

Mr. Holder recently said of his critics, "This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him, both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American." In other words, he insinuated Republicans -- along with Conservatives and Tea Party members -- are incapable of judging anyone solely by their character, something I take very personally.

Mr. Holder and others need to know, the criticism of the President is not of his person, but of his policies, which have clearly failed our nation--and most tragically of all in this supposedly post-racial period --have failed the black community....

As we proceed into this general election cycle, it would be a disgrace if Mr. Holder's comment is the first salvo in the upcoming campaign to deflect honest assessment of the President's performance in office. This campaign must be about ideas, policy and the direction of this country, and the President must not hide behind a curtain of so-called racial bias.

All Americans, black or white – and every shade in between – must be allowed to voice their opinions, level their criticisms and engage in candid discussion without fear of being labeled "racist" simply because of the color of their skin. This is precisely what Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of so eloquently, and what we celebrate today.

For a guy who doesn't like it when the race card is played, Allen West sure likes playing the race card. Here he is talking to Laura Ingraham on Fox News this past August:

REP. ALLEN WEST, R-FLA.: ... When you had unemployment in the black community, 16.3 percent in July and it dropped down to 15.9 percent for the month of August, that's not in the right direction. So you have this 21st century plantation that has been out there where the Democrat Party has forever taken the black vote for granted and you have established certain black leaders who are nothing more than the overseers of that plantation and now the people on the plantation are upset because they have been disregarded, disrespected and their concerns are not cared about. So I'm here as the modern day Harriet Tubman to kind of lead people on the underground railroad away from that plantation into a sense of sensibility.

INGRAHAM: Now, you are saying Maxine Waters is the plantation boss at this point?

WEST: Well, absolutely because what you end up having, you know, I'm going to be brutally honest, is that white liberals have turned over to certain leaders, "perceived leaders" in the black community like a Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or Maxine Waters or Barbara Lee and said, you know, pacify and keep the black community firmly behind us regardless of the failures of our social welfare policies. You look at the devastation in the black communities. You look at what's happened in the inner cities of Chicago or Detroit. You look at the riots and the things that are happening already in Philadelphia.

INGRAHAM: The flash mobs. Where the heck is Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters on the flash mobs? Where are they on those?

WEST: That's my point....

And you have West during the 2008 election:

My advice to Senator Obama is to run as a Man and Leader, and the American people will evaluate you as such, not as a victim. This is a Presidential race, based solely on a capacity to lead the United States of America. It is not about skin tone....

It also seems rather humorous that the Presidential candidate who was supposed to be such a "uniter" and transcend race is the one talking about it the most. If Senator Obama was confident in his abilities and character, he would not need to create a crutch for failure. Senator Obama has just tipped his hand, any criticism of him and his policies will be directly attributed to racism. I congratulate Senator Obama for taking race relations in America back some 30 years.

And here's Allen West a month ago:

Rep. Allen West suggested Thursday that Democrat Lois Frankel is running against him because "maybe she likes running against black guys."

The conservative freshman firebrand made the comment during an interview with POLITICO about his 2012 election plans, dubbing Frankel a political retread.

"She's a career politician looking for her next gig," West said of Frankel, adding that the mayor herself ran in another district against Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.). "Maybe she likes running against black guys," he continued, referring to a prior race with Hastings, who is also black....

West is a black guy who claims to want post-racial politics, and what does he do? He picks a racial fight -- on Martin Luther King Day. He's just being precisely what he claims to hate.

2012-01-16T09:30:00.000-05:00

WOW, THIS IS REALLY GOING TO SHAKE UP THE RACE IN THE ALL-IMPORTANT MAINSTREAM PUNDIT PRIMARY

I wasn't even going to post anything about Jon Huntsman's decision to drop out of the GOP presidential race, because it changes absolutely nothing about how the race will go from here, but people are talking about it, so what the hell. Huntsman could have won a bloc of delegates if adoring mainstream pundits had a state of their own, but since Punditstan hasn't applied for statehood yet, he was toast from the get-go. The only important thing about his departure from the race is that he's endorsing Mitt Romney, not sniffing around hoping he can get a third-party ballot line, so he's now thoroughly irrelevant.

Hey, maybe Romney as president will giv him his old ambassadorship back. That would be vaguely amusing. If not, I'm sure he'll get a commentator gig on Morning Joe, or some similar sinecure awarded by a grateful commentariat. And no, he doesn't have a prayer in 2016 if Romney loses, because while the GOP always seems to avoid nominating the kind of full-on wingnut the base wants, it's never, ever going to nominate anyone who shows disrespect to wingnut thinking. I always say that maybe -- maybe -- if Al Gore had managed to become president in 2000, the GOP would have looked at its three straight presidential losses and decided that it was time for the party to move to the center. But we'll never know, will we? (Thanks, Ralph!) With the way things turned out the Christie Whitmans and Colin Powells -- and Jon Huntsmans -- of the party will go to their graves without ever coming close to a national ticket. I don't see anything that's going to turn this around.

(And yes, I know -- Huntsman's not really a centrist, especially on economic issues. True, but he posirtioned himself as one in this race, and that just reads to the crazy base as the worst possible insult. In theory he could reposition himself in four years, but he'd have to make a Romneyesque transformation, and that involves not only changing positions but showing how much you hate hate hate Democrats and liberals. Romney, temperamentally, could do that. I don't think Huntsman can.)

2012-01-16T08:18:00.000-05:00

WHITEST SHADE OF PALE? ROMNEY?

Yesterday I meant to write about the ridiculous op-ed in which Lee Siegel argues that this is Mitt Romney's year because he's the whitest person in the race:

... there has yet to be any discussion over the one quality that has subtly fueled his candidacy thus far and could well put him over the top in the fall: his race. The simple, impolitely stated fact is that Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.

Of course, I'm not talking about a strict count of melanin density. I'm referring to the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways he telegraphs to a certain type of voter that he is the cultural alternative to America'’s first black president. It is a whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America.

Really? And that trumps the little rural Texas town Rick Perry grew up in, the one that -- as he never tired of telling us back when we were actually listening to him -- was too small to have a post office? In terms of our notions of cultural whiteness, doesn't white rural Texas trump white pretty much anything else?

...Yes, since 1978 the church has allowed blacks to become priests. But Mormonism is still imagined by its adherents as a religion founded by whites, for whites, rooted in a millenarian vision of an America destined to fulfill a white God's plans for earth.

Um, and we don't associate evangelical Protestantism, or Southern white Protestantism, with a history of segregation? By contrast, how many Americans know enough about Mormonism to know that blacks were once excluded from its priesthood?

It's true that Mr. Romney's opponents are all white as well. But each is tainted in his own way. Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich appear soft on Hispanic immigration...

Yeah, and Romney had those undocumented workers at his house. Besides, his father was born in Mexico -- where his family had traveled to escape legal and sociaietal pressure on Mormons (especially polygamous ones such as some in Romney's family tree). Isn't a big part of the myth of whiteness the fact that white people generally think the rules and laws of society are fair (mostly because they've written them)?

... Rick Santorum is an Italian-American Catholic ...

I'm not sure how many voters even know Santorum has ~~Catholic~~ Italian forebears.

And Ron Paul's isolationist conspiracy-mongering recalls, if anything, the radical-right fringe of the '50s and '60s, of the John Birchers and the followers of George Wallace, a manic moment even most evangelicals would rather forget.

See, this is where Siegel completely loses me. What could be whiter than Ron Paul's background? He published a newsletter full of articles written by actual white supremacists! He lives in Texas! He praises small government and self-sufficiency and the gold standard! What could be whiter than that?

... whether he means to or not, Mr. Romney connects with a central evangelic fantasy: that the Barack Obama years, far from being the way forward, are in fact a historical aberration, a tear in the white space-time continuum.

And, Perry, Gingrich, Bachmann and Santorum didn't connect with that? Really? Hell, even Herman Cain connected for quite a while with the notion that Obama's election was an aberration, and Cain's not white.

And if Romney is so white -- Siegel talks about all the usual white-picket-fence stuff we all talk about when we talk about the image Romney projects -- why didn't he win the nomination, or even come close, the year Obama was first nominated?

This is just idiocy. It's a disgrace it was even published.

2012-01-15T19:12:00.001-05:00

MORE FROM THE ANTI-OCCUPY BACKLASH

In my last post, I mentioned an article in The New York Times today making the point that 1-percenters really, really aren't all that bad. I don't mean to pick on The New York Times -- it probably contains more pieces sympathetic to progressive arguments about the nature of contemporary capitalism (particularly from its editorial board and from Paul Krugman) than just about any national media outlet (though that's a fairly low bar to clear) -- but in today's Times Magazine there's yet another article, from Adam Davidson (who also works for NPR's "Planet Money"), in which the treatment of Occupy Wall Street's main argument is essentially "Well, this is a satisfying thing to say if you feel like venting, but really, you can't be serious":

Hating Wall Street is an American tradition that dates back even to the days when Thomas Jefferson cursed that money lover Alexander Hamilton. And for centuries, the complaints about it have largely stayed the same: It does nothing! It creates chaos! It's a parasite that sucks hardworking Americans dry! (Or something to that effect.) But these are distortions of a fundamentally beneficial business....

Davidson goes on to describe what Wall Street does as more than "fundamentally beneficial" -- he describes it as the reason life as we know it exists:

Perhaps the best way to really appreciate what Wall Street does is to imagine life without it.

THE POOR WOULD STAY POOR

In the U.S., we use credit cards, mortgages, credit scores, securitized loans and other Wall Street innovations to do the miraculous: to persuade some institution with a lot of money to hand it over to someone who doesn't have that much....

THERE WOULD BE NO MIDDLE CLASS

Or at least it would look a whole lot different than it does today.... The financial-services industry ... performs a kind of fiscal time travel by pooling the nation's collective savings and transforming it into all sorts of loans. This allows people to spend money now that they won't earn until later. When spent wisely, this money borrowed from the future actually makes the future quite a bit brighter....

LOTS OF AWESOME THINGS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN....

I'm going to stop there and let you be physically ill for a second. That last subhead is the journalistic equivalent of that icky, singsongy, deliberately cloying folk music that was hip a few years ago (remember the soundtrack to Juno?). The point made under this subhead is that Wall Street finances businesses. Wow, awesome! It's the reason multinational drug companies and my favorite chevre producer can stay in business! Gee whillikers! So I guess we really should let Wall Streeters do whatever they want and be subjected whatever minuscule tax rate they prefer, and we should pay the tab every time they screw up, and not demand that they go to jail even if they were violating laws!

Davidson doesn't actually say that. Here's what he does say:

Wall Street's central function is to make our financial system more robust and less susceptible to unexpected risk, but it did precisely the opposite while, maddeningly, avoiding paying the price.

... perhaps the biggest reason to hate Wall Street is that it has made so many Americans hate such an indispensable system.

No, Adam. The biggest reason to hate Wall Street is that that avoidance of responsibility isn't something that "maddeningly" just so happened to occur, it's something that's built into the system. These guys have bought off the vast majority of our elected officials and have thus purchased immunity for whatever they do. They've also bought and paid for the privilege of sticking us with the tab every time they destroy all or part of the economy.

Davidson also says:

One lesson of this crisis is that regulation -- no matter how well intended -- cannot be trusted to rein in Wall Street.

No, that isn't a lesson of this crisis. As Paul Krugman says repeatedly, we did regulate finance -- from the days of FDR to the days of Ronald Reagan -- in such a way that we didn't have massive bubbles that burst and took the system (and lots of unwitting ordinary schmucks) down with them. We just don't have those regulations (Glass-Steagall and the like) now.

Most of the "awesome" stuff Wall Street gives us is stuff that it gave us back when we regulated it effectively. Some of the awesomeness actually started in those days -- the rise of the credit card, for instance, began in the postwar, highly regulated era of finance.

This, of course, is all just a way of saying that critics of the status quo, from Occupy and elsewhere, are hyperbolic children. It's what Occupy, or some part of the left, needs to push back against effectively right now. There was a moment when a skeptical view of capitalism was actually getting a hearing -- but that moment is slipping away. It's going to be completely lost soon if progressives don't seize it.

2012-01-15T11:19:00.000-05:00

WAS "KING OF BAIN" THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO MITT ROMNEY?

I'm wrong about a lot of things, but it's starting to look as if I've been right to predict that attacks on Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital were going to inspire GOP voters to rally around him: the new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Romney with a 21-point lead in South Carolina over Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, with his principal Bain attacker, Newt Gingrich, in fourth place, and with poll respondents saying things like this:

"I think those attacks are misguided. The process of any economy has long been one of creative destruction. Some things grow and some things disappear," said Steve Matthews, a lawyer from Columbia, South Carolina, who plans to vote for Romney.

Elsewhere, there are these quotes in a New York Times article by Jeff Zeleny titled "For Romney, Attacks on Bain Career Have Upside":

When Donald Hare, 69, a retiree on Hilton Head, was asked if he was a supporter of Mr. Romney, he declared, "I am now." He added: "What Newt did convinced me. He got into the gutter on Governor Romney."

...Without being prompted, [Jack] Schaaf volunteered the fact that he strongly sided with Mr. Romney regarding Bain Capital. He offered an explanation that echoed the campaign’s defense.

"He was running an investment company that put money into distressed corporations and turned them around, reduced expenses or liquidated them. That’s the business," Mr. Schaaf said. "To be criticized for that is kind of a dirty dig."

Zeleny thinks the Bain attacks are helping Romney because they're diverting the attention of South Carolina voters, which means that Romney isn't being asked about his Mormonism or his former moderation on social issues. I don't think it's just that. Look, this is America. A rule of thumb: Americans have no class consciousness, and right-wing Americans have negative class consciousness. Accusations of capitalist rapaciousness give wingers a reason to rally around Mitt -- wingers don't think there's any such thing as capitalist rapaciousness, as I keep telling you. If Gingrich had started this before Iowa, Romney could have won Iowa decisively.

The ducks are lining up extraordinarily well for Romney -- he's becoming a person the base wants to defend at just about the right time; the inaccuracies in "King of Bain" and the early rollout of the Bain material mean it will be deemed an old issue by the time it's of use to the Obama campaign ...

... And then we see the "liberal media," in the form of The New York Times, trying to do a nuanced portrait of 1-percenters today. Go here to read that. It's all about how some 1-percenters have inherited wealth while others are hardworking oncologists who are still paying students loans, and on and on in that vein. Because the Occupy movement never built on its initial 1%/99% meme in any effective way, the response to that initial message is now in the hands of the right-wing press and the mainstream press, which are concluding that Occupy was either all wrong or partially wrong, respectively. Unless Occupy or some other part of the left reemerges with a compelling set of mesaages or actions, we will not have an election in 2012 that focuses on questions of wealth versus lack of wealth -- unless we have one in which we decide consciously to vote against our own self-interest and in favor of the interests of the wealthy. Occupy didn't do enough. It isn't doing enough. The 1% are pushing back, and they're winning.

2012-01-14T16:30:00.000-05:00

IS IT GOING TO BE A TWO-MAN RACE AFTER ALL?

I know most of you won't be surprised by this -- maybe I was the only person on the left taking these folks seriously -- but it's looking as if Americans Elect is having a very difficult time attracting a candidate its leadership likes.

A new group that hopes to tap into a rising appetite for a third-party presidential challenger has discovered that $30 million in secret cash can buy ballot access and attention, but not necessarily a dream candidate.

The group, Americans Elect, failed to generate interest in possible campaigns from Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lamar Alexander, and its intensive outreach to a host of other prospective candidates, including former Nebraska Sens. Chuck Hagel and Bob Kerrey, hasn't yielded much public enthusiasm for its efforts.

Even Jon Huntsman, whom top Americans Elect officials have supported, has ruled out the possibility of seeking the group's nomination....

Instead, Americans Elect has attracted attention from the allies of potential candidates who don't seem well-suited to the group'’s goal of leading a centrist surge on Election Day, including obscure figures such as Buddy Roemer, and those who seem to defy the group's moderate positioning, such as Donald Trump and Ron Paul.

Meanwhile, supporters of the group are taking heat for provisions aimed at preventing their process from being hijacked by a figure like Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert....

I just assumed that, with all that backing from Wall Streeters and the likes of uber-PUMA Lady Lynn Forrester de Rothschild, these people would have some kind of impact on the race -- not enough to field a winning candidate, or even enough to field a candidate who could win a single state, but enough to possibly tip certain states into the win column for whichever major-party candidate seemed to be the ideological opposite of the Americans Elect candidate, much as John Anderson tipped Massachusetts into Ronald Reagan's win column in 1980, presumably because of Paul/Nader-style support from young voters.

I also thought yammering pundits would give AE a lot of free publicity -- hello, Tom Friedman -- and make its candidate the candidate of choice for people who don't really think for themselves, but think they think for themselves.

But it looks as if no mainstream pol wants to get out of the good graces of one or the other political party. It's sort of like what we always hear about prisons, or rough neighborhoods: you don't want to try to survive without affiliating yourself with one gang or another. These guys are afraid not to keep flying their colors.

I assumed the AE candidate might get as much as 7% of the vote, while ideological candidates might get up to 1% or 2%. I still think we'll have the latter -- a Libertarian (the percentage will go up if it's Ron Paul rather than Gary Johnson); a Jesus-'n'-guns candidate who'll do better than everyone who's previously run on his line because the level of disgust on the right with the GOP's "RINO" candidate will be greater than it was in '08; and probably someone like Rocky Anderson on the left in the Nader role, also doing better than Nader did in '08 or '04 (though maybe not '00) because all those Glenn Greenwald rants will have their effect (although the Lib will probably be the principal beneficiary of those).

Still, the AE failure is making 2012 look less like 1948 and more like 2000. What that means for the outcome I don't know, but it means the two-party system still rules.

2012-01-14T12:30:00.000-05:00

EVEN THE LIBERAL NEW YORK TIMES (KINDA) HEARTS TEBOW

If an atheist Occupy Wall Street backer were the new Cinderella star of the National Football League, do you think Fox News would be giving us stories about the guy that said, in effect, "Yeah, I can see why people admire him, and everyone on our side who attacks him is probably just guilt-ridden"? So why do so many "liberal media" stories on Tim Tebow include passages like this?

Decent people who are proud of their faith, do good things and succeed in life tend to irritate some of us; they remind us of our private failures, so, naturally, we hope they stumble.

That's from Dan Barry in The New York Times today.

And you know what? It's not true. For one thing, many of us don't feel guilty that we've had premarital sex or use cuss words. Many of us don't feel guilty that we don't glorify God incessantly. (Many of us don't believe in God and are perfectly comfortable about it.)

What tends to irritate us is people who think they're better than we are, and who incessantly remind us that they feel this way. That's what's irritating about Tebow's public displays of (moral) perfection.

I would argue that even Jesus himself would agree that Tebow's showoffy sanctimony is wrong. I know Saturday Night Live has made that point in a sketch, but here's a quote that's actually from the Bible; I've used it many times on this blog in reference to public figures who desperately want you to pay attention to how holy they are, but I can't think of anyone in public life who's deserved it more than Tebow. Tim, here's Luke 18:10-14:

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

He's talking to you, Tim.

There's one more passage from the Times story I'd like to point out:

What, exactly, is it about Tim Tebow that so fascinates and provokes us? ...

Part of the answer may lie in the way he seems oblivious to the throaty roars that envelop him on and off the field, as though Tebow is always tebowing, whether kneeling or standing up.

Oblivious? Oblivious? That's ridiculous. I don't even think Tebow would say he's "oblivious." I know enough evangelical boilerplate to say that he'd probably tell you that God wants all believers to proselytize, to proclaim God's word, and, well, God has blessed him with the tremendous opportunity to do so before tens of thousands of people in football stadiums and millions of people on television, so he's just doing what the Lord wants.

Yes, he is -- as ostentatiously and self-aggrandizingly as humanly possible. Which is what pisses so many of us off.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-14T10:01:00.002-05:00

In Their Minds It's Always 2003

Submitted with very little comment, here's Dana Loesch responding to the reaction to her endorsement of urinating on Taliban corpses:

My entire point of the past two days was to highlight the absurd reaction from militant troop-bashers to these Marines. In my Twitter timeline yesterday progressives called our military “killers, kids, barbaric trash, murderers …” The only time soldiers are celebrated by the left is when they engage in protests like OWS. The rest of the time they’re demonized....

I’ve seen more outrage towards our troops over this incident than I have ever seen towards the Taliban themselves who’ve beheaded soldiers (American and Afghan), raped and tortured women, sent out suicide bombers, and carried out horrific attacks.

The disproportionate anger on the part of progressives is fueled by their dislike of our military. That what this proves.

Ah, memories. Remember when this was the standard line for the right-wing hawks? Remember when it used to work?

2012-01-13T18:00:00.000-05:00

CHECKING THE KERNING

I see that "King of Bain," the anti-Romney attack film, got "Four Pinocchios" from fact checker Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post. Am I wrong to fear that this film is going to be to Romney what the Texas Air National Guard documents were to George W. Bush -- something sufficiently discredited that it has the perverse effect of immunizing the candidate against any further questions on its subject?

I should point out now that I disagree with most lefties about those TANG documents -- I think the documents really were fabrications, for reasons I explained when they were in the news. The short version is that I worked with high-end typewriters a decade after these documents were said to have been produced, and even then the machines I worked with simply weren't capable of the typographic subtleties seen in the documents, subtleties that no longer seem subtle because they've been available to everyone with a computer for many years now. Yeah, some people in 2004 found ads for super-high-end typewriters that existed at the time the documents were said to have been produced -- but what was the likelihood that a lowly National Guard outpost in Texas would have had such machines?

I really don't want to reargue this, because it doesn't matter what we think -- what matters is that the public decided that the documents were dubious, and thus it became impossible to ask what were still legitimate questions about Bush's National Guard service. "King of Bain" really might do the same thing with regard to Mitt Romney's business career -- which would be very unfortunate.

Back in '04, I speculated that Karl Rove might have been responsible for the creation and dissemination of the discredited TANG documents. I don't know if that makes any sense -- and I don't know if "King of Bain" could have been deliberately made with distortions in order to cut off its line of attack. I strongly doubt it, though. The film seems much more like the kind of anti-liberal hatchet job generated by the right-wing media, except it happens to tap into pro-worker sentiment and it's aimed at a fellow Republican. But the effect may be the same -- Romney may be as much a beneficiary of backlash as W.

2012-01-13T15:00:00.000-05:00

THINGS I LEARNED FROM TODAY'S DAVID BROOKS COLUMN

From today's David Brooks column I learned the following:

* Great presidents "tend to be emotionally secure" -- except for, say, Lincoln, who was clinically depressed.

* A great president is likely to have been raised "in an aristocratic family" -- although ~~greats~~ Brooks-designated greats such as Eisenhower, Lincoln, and Reagan weren't born aristocrats.

* Great presidents tend to have "experienced crushing personal setbacks" -- except for, say, Reagan, whose worst setback was that a character he played in a movie had his legs amputated.

* Great presidents are usually "experienced political insiders" -- except for Ike, who'd never previously held elective office.

* "[G]reat presidents tend to have superb political judgment" -- which is another way of saying that people who are good at being politicians ... are good at being politicians. Thank you, Professor Tautology.

2012-01-13T14:30:00.000-05:00

SO, WHO IN THE GOP WILL JUMP ON THIS BANDWAGON?

(UPDATE, MONDAY MORNING: See below -- I told you it would be Perry.)

Perhaps you've seen this story:

CNN political analyst Dana Loesch celebrated the U.S. Marines who appear to have urinated on the bodies of dead Taliban members during her radio show on Thursday.

"Now we have a bunch of progressives that are talking smack about our military because there were marines caught urinating on corpses, Taliban corpses," Loesch said during her radio program on FM News Talk 97.1. "Can someone explain to me if there's supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who, as part of an organization, murdered over 3,000 Americans? I'd drop trou and do it too. That's me though. I want a million cool points for these guys. Is that harsh to say? Come on people, this is a war. What do people think this is?"

Since we're talking about an act of desecration in so flippant a fashion, I'll be flippant, too, and ask: Who do you think will be the first Republican candidate for president to embrace this viewpoint? No, not Donald Trump -- he's not a Republican candidate anymore, though he is 100% in agreement with Loesch.

(Love that "Semper Fi!" Trump clearly hopes his fans will overlook the fact that he's a Vietnam-era chickenhawk.)

No, my vote is for Rick Perry. He's always had a what-the-hell attitude when it comes to signing on to extremist positions, and, really, what has he got to lose?

****

Meanwhile, Loesch herself attempts a defense over at Breitbart's Big Government with a bit of I'm rubber, you're glue:

If "desecration" is a concern for progressives, where was their outrage when the remains of over 200 Air Force members were dumped in a landfill?

Where was it, Dana? Here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. Want me to find you some more, Dana?

2012-01-13T11:32:00.002-05:00

CHUCK TODD'S CREW DOESN'T UNDERSTAND MATTERS OF THE WINGNUT HEART

This, from MSNBC's First Read, strikes me as way off the mark:

This morning, the Romney campaign is up with a new TV ad in South Carolina that defends his Bain record and criticizes his GOP rivals for attacking it. It's the first defensive ad of the campaign from Team Romney "Mitt Romney helped create and ran a company that invested in struggling businesses, started new ones, and rebuilt old ones, creating thousands of jobs. Those are the facts," the narrator states in the ad. "We expected the Obama administration to put free markets on trial, but as the Wall Street Journal said, 'Mr. Romney's GOP opponents are embarrassing themselves by taking the Obama line.'" As we noted yesterday, Romney is stuck in a tough place. Emotionally, the sad stories of the laid-off workers will strike a chord; the positive stories of Staples and Sports Authority will help blunt a little -- but logical or "head' defenses are usually never as effective in campaigns when attacks pull at the heart.

(Emphasis added.)

Um, folks? These are GOP voters we're talking about. This ad attacks Obama. An attack on Obama is precisely what "pull[s] at the heart" for these voters. They hate Obama more than they value their own economic security. The only thing wrong with the ad is that it wastes half its 30-second running time not attacking Obama and linking Romney's critics to him. Look, I know Romney has to get positive Bain spin out there, but he really needs to get that done so he can get back to what really works for him: attacking Obama. If he's smart, he'll produce an ad that consists of nothing but descriptions of his Bain critics as Obama clones. It'll work.

2012-01-13T09:24:00.000-05:00

WAITING FOR THE USEFUL IDIOTS TO STOP BEING SO USEFUL

In response to all the Bain attacks on Mitt Romney, Andrew Sullivan declares that Romney could still lose, because of what voters are now hearing about him:

But what makes it so dangerous to Romney, it seems to me, is that the Bain Brahmin didn't just fire thousands of working class people in restructuring and in closing companies. He made a fucking unimaginable fortune doing it. That's the issue. Other Republicans can speak about the need for free markets in a sluggish economy. But with Romney, we have a singular example of someone who made a quarter of a billion dollars by firing the white middle and working class in droves in ways that do not seem designed to promote growth or efficiency, but merely to enrich Bain.

To which I say: White working-class Republican voters, if this upsets you, what the hell do you think you've been voting for for the past thirty (forty? forty-five?) years?

Over at The New Republic, William Galston lists several reasons why Bain is trouble for Romney and could "kill his candidacy":

The only thing surprising about this issue is how late in the day it took center-stage. After all, an increasing number of blue-collar workers have become Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. The Tea Party movement is hardly sympathetic to Wall Street and the financial sector. And a key element of the Republican base -- small business -- has long regarded the corporate/establishment wing of the party with suspicion. As a populist whipping-boy, Romney is straight out of central casting.

Yes, but all three of those groups love the GOP regardless of the actual consequences. Small business owners would rather throw in their lot with Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce than with those horrible overregulating socialist Democrats -- even if big business gets nearly all of the benefit from the GOP alliance. White working-class voters get patriotic wars, abortion restrictions, and small tax cuts from the GOP, as well as a heartland-vs.-elites culture war that's exciting and inspirational, and don't seem to care that the economy that emerges from Republican rule never really serves their needs. And don't get me started on the tea party, which, as I've said many times, hates big business and Wall Street only for allying with (ick! pthui!) government, and ascribes 100% of the blame for the financial meltdown to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

These voting blocs have never identified the real enemy before. Why should we think they're going to get it now?

2012-01-12T19:16:00.002-05:00

EMPATHY, MITTBOT STYLE

I haven't seen a clip of this, so I don't know how it actually came off if you were there watching it, but, as described here, it just seems, well, peculiar:

PALM BEACH, FL -- Softening somewhat his response to recent Republican criticism of his private sector career, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney sought to project sympathy with out-of-work Americans, calling unemployment "not just a statistic."

"Being unemployed for a long period of time means families having a hard time making ends meet," Romney said. "It means in some cases people having trouble in their marriages, losing faith, becoming depressed."

It does? Really, Mitt? Hey, thanks for the clarification!

That's Romney softening? To me he sounds like Hanna, the adolescent heroine of the eponymous 2011 movie, who's lived nearly her entire life in a cabin in the woods with her father, a man devoted to cultivating her rather extraordinary ability to master survival skills and book knowledge, the result being that she's both a kick-ass warrior and a brainiac who recites passages from books verbatim. She decides to leave seclusion and take her chances in the real world, and at one point she meets a young man with whom she's on the verge of sharing her first kiss. Here's what she says to him:

Kissing requires a total of 34 facial muscles, and 112 postural muscles. The most important muscle involved is the orbicularis oris muscle, because it is used to pucker the lips.

That's what Romney's little recitation of poverty facts reminds me of.

Now, it would be amusing if he followed this up the way Hanna follows up her mini-recitaion. (SPOILER ALERT: She body-slams the guy.) But he's not that kind of well-trained automaton.

2012-01-12T14:59:00.000-05:00

BUT IF THEY DID THAT, WHAT ELSE WOULD THERE BE ROOM FOR IN THE PAPER?

This, from Arthur Brisbane, the public editor of The New York Times, is being met with scorn and derision:

Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?

I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge "facts" that are asserted by newsmakers they write about....

[One] example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches "apologizing for America," a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the "post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same? ...

I know what the obvious answer is: of course news reporters at the Times (and elsewhere) should do the same.

But in reality, how do you even begin to do this in any comprehensive way when the typical statement made by any Republican -- on any subject, on any given day -- is like this one from Senator Jim DeMint on MSNBC's Morning Joe, as flagged by Media Matters (hat tip: Steve Benen)?

JON MEACHAM (REPORTER): Senator, you've been in Washington now for 12 years. Actually more, sorry. Have things changed in a palpable, tactile way in terms of getting things done from when you came in?

DEMINT: Yeah, I think they are more polarized. And it's a contrast I try to make in the book because we really no longer have a shared vision. I mean, I know from business that you have people coming from different directions, they can work together if they have shared goals and a shared vision. But now we have the tension between those who want centralized power, government control of education, health care, transportation, energy, and Republicans, who are I think finding their footing around their core principles of we need to devolve power out of Washington, we need to decentralize, because that's what makes America work, is the bottom-up approach.

So saying to compromise now, and I use this analogy a lot, is just like a coach telling his team to go out and work with the other guys and cooperate with them. The Democrats are there to beat us. Every policy that they introduce is to centralize power. They are completely incapable of cutting spending because their constituency is based on dependency on government and those who want more from government.

Total words uttered by DeMint? 182. Number of lies? Well, let's try to enumerate just some of them:

* "those who want centralized power, government control of ... health care": Well, consider the law most Republicans consider the epitome of centralized Stalinism: the health care law. There are provisions for state alternatives to the law's framework. On the other hand, just about every Republican in America supports the notion that health insurance should be sold across state lines -- which would inevitably mean that every state's laws protecting insurance customers would be trumped by the laws of whatever state allowed the insurance companies the most freedom to screw customers. Who's the centralizing party here?

* "those who want ... government control of education": Um, George W. Bush was a Democrat? I didn't know that.

* "Republicans, who are I think finding their footing around their core principles of we need to devolve power out of Washington, we need to decentralize": Really? Since when do Republicans (apart from those named Paul) think state law should trump federal law on medical marijuana? (I know, I know: Democrats are no better.) And which party has the most politicians calling for a federal marriage amendment?

* "So saying to compromise now, and I use this analogy a lot, is just like a coach telling his team to go out and work with the other guys and cooperate with them." No, it isn't "just like" that. Every sporting event has one winner and one loser. In a well-run government, the sides can split the difference in an infinite number of ways.

* "They are completely incapable of cutting spending": For better or worse, Democrats have been offering all kinds of plans to cut spending -- they just keep getting rejected by Republicans because they're paired with targeted tax increases. Oh, and which party in recent memory had a president who balanced several budgets?

* "because their constituency is based on dependency on government and those who want more from government": This is just the typical right-wing dog-whistle declaration that Democratic voters, by definition, are those damn bums on welfare.

That's just in one 182-word Republican statement.

So, yeah, newspapers should try to rebut obvious lies. But with Republicans, when would you ever be able to stop? How would you ever be able to do anything else?

2012-01-12T11:30:00.000-05:00

THE OVERDUE DEBATE WE PROBABLY AREN'T REALLY ABOUT TO HAVE

E.J. Dionne makes a hopeful prediction:

Thanks to Mitt Romney and such well-known socialist intellectuals as Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, the United States is about to have the big debate on the nature of modern capitalism that should have started back in 2008.

Gosh, I'd sure like to believe that, but I'm not sure it's true. And even if it is true, it's rather disheartening to see where the debate is going to start if even a liberal like Dionne frames it this way:

What if a certain class of capitalist makes scads of money not by building up companies but by tearing them down? What if there is a distinction between the capitalist we typically honor who comes up with a good product and hires people to make and market it; and another kind who takes over a company, pulls out all the cash he can, and then abandons it to die?

Yeah, what if? That would be really horrible, in the almost unimaginable event that it were true. Could that possibly be the case? Is it actually conceivable that some capitalism is evil?

That really would be the starting point for any debate we have in America on the nature of capitalism: whether it's an absolutely wonderful kind of fairy dust that heals whatever it touches 100% of the time ... or somewhat less than 100% of the time. Because this is America, and, as Gallup has pointed out recently, fear of big business has gone down during this endless recession. And as that new Pew poll notes, Americans increasingly see conflict between the rich and the poor, but their own distrust of the wealthy hasn't gone up one bit:

A narrow plurality (46%) believes the rich are wealthy because they were born into money or "know the right people." But nearly as many (43%) say the rich got that way because of their own "hard work, ambition or education."

The latest result is virtually identical to the findings of a 2008 Pew survey. It found that 46% of the public believed that riches are mostly the result of having the right connections or being born into the right family, while 42% say hard work and individual characteristics are the main reason the rich are wealthy.

(Emphasis added.)

****

And are we really sure we're going to have a Bain-fueled debate about capitalism at all? Here's Mitt Romney about to use big bucks to turn the general perception of his work at Bain to "opinions differ":

Campaign advisers are polishing new messaging, tailored to rebut Republican and Democratic attacks separately. They’re cueing up new commercials.

And they're rolling out a more aggressive approach from the candidate himself....

They'll start with advertisements featuring employees of companies started and rescued by Bain telling their stories -- a direct response to the documentary released by the pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC that features employees of four companies closed by Bain that brutally slams Romney as a job killer....

Romney adviser Kevin Madden said they’re confident they’ll quash those attacks with their new rebuttal.

"For every scare story that they try to present related to the governor's experience in the private sector and free enterprise," Madden said, "we can point to a whole host of successful enterprises that have resulted in job creation and wealth and prosperity."

I'm afraid that we're going to wind up where we always seem to wind up -- with critics of capitalism on the defensive, and with any criticism of any capitalist enterprise successfully redefined as advocacy of full-blown socialism. And the only "big debate" we'll have is a rehash of the usual one: about whether government spending is the economic equivalent of the Ebola virus (utterly lethal and difficult to treat) or the HIV virus (more treatable but also extremely lethal). We never seem to tire of that one.

2012-01-12T07:38:00.000-05:00

I THINK I SAW THIS MOVIE BACK IN 2000

Two stories. First from The Wall Street Journal:

Bolton to Back Romney

Former U.N Ambassador John Bolton is set to endorse Mitt Romney and will join his top team of foreign-policy advisers, according to people close to the campaign....

The Bolton endorsement will help buttress Mr. Romney's image as the more hawkish of the GOP candidates....

Then from ThinkProgress:

Former Bush administration ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton said today on Fox News that the killing of an Iranian scientist and sanctions against Iran constitute only "half-measures" in the quest to stunt Iran's nuclear ambitions....

Openly contemptuous of international law and a longtime proponent of war with Iran, Bolton's only objection to the killing of Iranian scientists seems to be that it's not enough for him:
BOLTON: ... I think, honestly, that half-measures like assassinations or sanctions are only going to produce the crisis more quickly. The better way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons is to attack its nuclear weapons program directly, break their control over the nuclear fuel cycle.

I bring this up because the complete, exhaustive list of people who can be elected president in November contains only two names: Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

If you are hell-bent on turning Barack Obama into a foreign-policy Antichrist, and on declaring that any progressive who doesn't regard him as a war criminal is a traitor to left values and human decency -- well, this is the alternative. The only alternative. Not Ron Paul. Not Gary Johnson. This.

Our moral betters -- Glenn Greenwald and others -- are making it their life's work to persuade as many progressives as possible to loathe Barack Obama and regard him as indistinguishable from Republicans on every issue. But every Republican president we've elected in my lifetime has upped the ante on previous Republican presidents' awfulness.* My rule of thumb is: The worst president in American history is always the next Republican president.

Would President Romney really be worse on foreign policy than George W. Bush? Stay home in November, or vote libertarian the way you may have voted Nader in 2000, and we all may get to find out.

*With the exception, I guess, of George H.W. Bush, though even he got us into two wars.

2012-01-11T13:47:00.002-05:00

THE SECOND TIME AS FARCE

Yeah, this Dave Weigel post is clever:

Haven't We Lived Through This Primary Before?

I'm thinking of a Republican primary. It starts with a candidate (John McCain/Mitt Romney) who ran once before, came in second place, and won over the party's elite class without winning over its base. Other candidates, understandably unwilling to accept this, line up: An under-funded social conservative (Mike Huckabee/Rick Santorum), an elder statesman who's walked to the altar three times (Rudy Giuliani/Newt Gingrich), a libertarian who wants to bring back the gold standard (Ron Paul/Ron Paul).

The conservative base is displeased. In the year before the primary, it pines for a perfect candidate. At the end of summer, on (September 5/August 13), it gets him: (Fred Thompson/Rick Perry). The dream candidate immediately rises to the top of national polls, but collapses after lazy, distaff debate performances. When the primaries arrive, he's in single digits and reduced to attacking the front-runners. But in Iowa, he does just well enough to justify staying in the race....

This goes on, all the way to "The Republican base looks at the wreckage and shudders. It can never allow this to happen ever again."

BooMan tries to continue the story past the primaries:

... Which means that Mitt Romney will be looking for a running mate that can create the same kind of excitement as Sarah Palin without all the downsides....

Well, I agree with that -- I've long felt that Romney is going to pick the most right-wing, Fox-viewer-exciting, probably Jesus-y candidate he can find who doesn't alarm the millionaire mainstream pundits. Which means not Allen West or Michele Bachmann, though quite possibly Marco Rubio or Chris Christie. (My long-shot pick? Santorum. Really, don't rule him out: he has some neoconnish foreign-policy chops, he's a favorite of the God-botherers, and he doesn't have to be all that exciting because he'd be matched up against Joe Biden. And a Santorum pick would say to the wingnut purists, "Do you think I'm ideologically suspect? Hey, suspect this, schmucks.")

And then the question ultimately becomes: But didn't that strategy fail for McCain? So will Romney go in another direction? Or is the continuation of the parallelism inevitable, all the way to November?

Here's what worries me: The '08 election took place with voters thinking everything sucks in America. The '12 election takes place with voters thinking everything sucks in America. The '08 election took place with Democrats controlling Congress, and Republicans bottling up everything Democrats want to do from the White House. The '12 election takes place with Democrats controlling the White House, and Republicans bottling up everything Democrats want to do from Congress.

But voters always blame the party in the White House when they think everything sucks -- don't they? Is that where the parallel breaks down? Or can Obama really run against Congress and make the real parallel 1948 -- especially if there are multiple third-party candidates?

We'll see.

2012-01-11T11:34:00.000-05:00

MITT WHO?

How excited is Fox Nation about yesterday's New Hampshire primary results? So excited that this is the lead story on the FN front page right now:

FN gets the story from Politico (which it always refers to as "Left-Wing Politico," except when borrowing its content). Here's the clip that's being cited, in which the First Lady responds to a question about the Jodi Kantor book:

Fox plays this prominently because there are very few things FN readers like more than hating the woman they like to call "Mooch." In, they insist, a totally non-racist way, of course.

2012-01-11T08:19:00.000-05:00

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, RON

Well, this is just standard-issue political bluster, but it would be amusing if it could actually happen:

Ron Paul To Everyone But Mitt: Drop Out

Rep. Ron Paul's campaign called on the rest of the Republican field to drop out of the race and unite behind him in order to defeat Mitt Romney.

"We urge Ron Paul's opponents who have been unsuccessfully trying to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney to unite by getting out of the race and uniting behind Paul's candidacy," campaign chair Jesse Benton said in a statement....

Ron Paul can max out at somewhat more than 20 percent of the vote in a multi-candidate field; a one-on-one race would show us that he can max out at pretty much exactly the same point in a two-candidate field. He wouldn't do any better in a two-candidate race than he's doing now, because every Republican who doesn't love him hates him. As Gallup just noted, Republican voters consider Paul the least acceptable nominee of the remaining candidates. He's less acceptable than Huntsman!

And his maximum is going to be even lower in Bible Belt states where they really, really believe in sending troops overseas to kill brown people for Jesus. (Goodbye, South Carolina -- where, by the way, he's never polled higher than 12%.) And he can match his Iowa and New Hampshire results only in states where they let Democrats and independents vote. (Goodbye, Florida, where his poll peak has been 10%.)

I know, I know -- why should I be gleeful at the thought of Paul's demise? After all, I agree with him on some issues, and I don't agree with Romney on any. I certainly shouldn't be cheered by the prospect of an even more decisive Romney rout.

Well, I think the Romney rout is going to be pretty decisive even with the other losers and also-rans in the race, so I don't see much difference there.

I guess it's just that, for thirty years, I've watched my side utterly fail to counter a GOP narrative celebrating overt capitalism-worship, simpleminded tricorn-hat patriotism, and hippie-peacenik bashing, and now I'm watching another narrative develop that my side is also failing to counter, one of even more extreme capitalism-worship and simpleminded tricorn-hat patriotism ... and it's being sold successfully to hippie peaceniks.

And all it's going to do is lead to bigger holes in the social safety net, and probably no real retreat from militarism or the drug war, because there already exists a large bloc of elected officials who are pretty far along the Paul road on repealing twentieth-century social welfare, and there's hardly anybody on the same page with Paul on the issues on which he's on my side. Paulism just makes Romney and the rest of the GOP more brutal in their assault on economic liberalism; it doesn't make drug and foreign policy any more progressive, or at least it hasn't.

So, yeah, Ron, I'd love it if you'd fight Mitt one on one, just to watch the ass-kicking you'd get.

2012-01-10T22:53:00.000-05:00

RON PAUL'S MISTY WATERCOLOR MEMORIES

I caught a nit of Ron Paul's speech tonight. I was particularly struck by this:

t’s been -- America has been the greatest country ever, the most prosperous country ever, the largest middle class ever. It’s not that way today. Our middle class is shrinking. The country is getting poorer.

Yeah, schumck, and you know what we had in this country back when we had the largest middle class ever? All kinds of big government programs and expenditures, of the kind you libertarians oppose. The GI Bill. The interstate highway system. FHA loans. Social Security, and eventually Medicare. Evil government! Oh, and (as Paul Krugman never tires of reminding us) a well-regulated banking system (Glass-Steagall!) that was rendered too boring and safe to put the public at risk of having to pay for booms that went bust.

Paul's invocation of the era of the thriving American middle class infuriated me just the way I was infuriated every time Glenn Beck, in his TV heyday, used to weep for the lost America of his viewers' youth. Hey, schmuck, I thought you said we've been living in a fascist nightmare ever since Woodrow Wilson was president! How can your viewers also have lived through a lost Golden Age?

You want to weep for what we had in the mid-twentieth century and lost? Remember how we got it in the first place. It wasn't through unregulated free markets, idiots.

2012-01-10T15:00:00.000-05:00

WHAT I HAVE, DAVID, IS GILDED AGE DERANGEMENT SYNDROME

This David Sirota post about Ron Paul starts bad and eventually gets much, much worse:

It’s rather sad that nearly every article written by a non-libertarian about Ron Paul begins with a disclaimer that the writer is not endorsing Paul for president. Yet, with a virulent case of Ron Paul Derangement Syndrome plaguing partisan Obama loyalists, it bears repeating if only to preempt future mischaracterizations and slander: I am not endorsing Ron Paul for president.

Does every strong disagreement have to be turned into a "derangement syndrome"? Is it just not acceptable to say that certain people's ideas are abhorrent? I think the complete evisceration of the Great Society, the New Deal, and the Progressive Era would be utterly cataclysmic for this country. Am I not supposed to say that because it hurts the feelings of Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota?

Sirota has one reasonable point to make:

... In seeing Paul's economic views, positions on a woman's right to choose, regulatory ideas and ties to racist newsletters as disqualifying factors for their electoral support, many self-identified liberal Obama supporters are essentially deciding that, for purposes of voting, those set of issues are simply more important to them than the issues of war, foreign policy, militarism, Wall Street bailouts, surveillance, police power and civil liberties -- that is, issues in which Paul is far more progressive than the sitting president....

By contrast, Paul's progressive-minded supporters are simply taking the other position -- they are basically saying that, for purposes of voting, President Obama's record on militarism, civil liberties, foreign policy, defense budgets and bailouts are more disqualifying than Paul's newsletter, economics and regulatory positions.... And just as Obama supporters shouldn’t pretend they aren't expressing their preferences, Paul’s supporters shouldn't do that either. Their support of the Republican congressman is a statement of personal priorities within the larger progressive agenda.

Fine. I am expressing a preference for liberal economics, even in damaged, vestigial form, because economic inequality is the most important issue for me. Democrats may not be reducing inequality, but Republicanism will cause it to metastasize rapidly, and Paulism would make it increase so fast we wouldn't know what hit us.

But Sirota loses me completely when he writes this:

... in terms of realpolitik, there's a strong case to be made that Paul's progressive-minded supporters understand something that Obama's supporters either can't or don't want to: namely, that a presidential election is a vote for president, not a vote to elect the entire federal government. As such, when faced with candidates whom you agree with on some issues and totally disagree with on other issues, it's perfectly rational -- and wholly pragmatic -- to consider one's own multifaceted policy preferences in the context of what a prospective president will have the most unilateral power to actually enact.

With Paul, it just so happens that most of the ultra-progressive parts of his platform (and legislative career) correspond to the presidential powers that are most unilateral in nature....

By contrast, the policy areas where Paul is most at odds with progressives are the areas Congress has far more control over — specifically, budgets and regulatory statutes....

Is Sirota nuts? We're almost certain to elect two GOP-majority houses of Congress in 2012 and he thinks Ron Paul, as president, would have a harder time getting his economic policies enacted?

If Paul somehow got elected president, Republican extremists in Congress would gleefully join with him in dismantling the government and poking holes in the social safety net. It would be post-2010 Wisconsin or Florida or Ohio on a national scale, except with a full-on libertarian rather than a semi-libertarian in the Walker/Scott/Kasich role. Do you really want to find out how much damage the teabaggers in Congress can do with Ron Paul giving them cover? Is legal dope and the curtailment of wars and surveillance really worth so much to you that you're willing to risk that? That you're willing to risk the nuclear option in the war against the middle class and the poor?

I make no apologies for arguing against that.

****

SEE ALSO: BooMan on Ron Paul, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Stoller. A brief excerpt:

If you look at Ron Paul's political philosophy in toto, you'll realize that Paul basically opposes every progressive accomplishment since about 1913. I've never heard him oppose female suffrage, but he'd like to roll back just about every other thing the federal government has done since the creation of the Federal Reserve. The only way a progressive can reach the point where their beliefs converge with Ron Paul's is if they've basically given up on this country and on progressivism.

Amen.

2012-01-10T11:45:00.000-05:00

WINGERS HATE EVIL FAT CATS? THE ZOMBIE LIE THAT JUST WON'T DIE

If Nate Silver is right about the New Hampshire outcome -- he's saying Romney 38.5%, Paul 18.6%, Huntsman 17.0%, Santorum 12.3%, Gingrich 11.5%, Perry 1.2% -- then it will turn out that capitalism-bashing did absolutely no harm to Mitt Romney, and that the two guys who sound most like Democrats in attacking Romney's business record will have finished fourth and fifth, in a state that's seen as having a moderate GOP voter base.

So won't that end all the talk about how even Republicans hate the rapacious rich?

Nawww. Pundits and bloggers will just say we need to wait for all that Sheldon Adelson money to work its magic for Gingrich in South Carolina; maybe they'll say that Jon Huntsman still has a chance, or that he could have a chance if his billionaire daddy would just give millions to his super PAC.

People, please: just stop. Wingnut base voters don't want Gingrich and Perry to bash Romney as a businessman. Wingnut base voters don't want Huntsman to bash Romney as someone who wouldn't serve his country under Obama. Wingnut base voters love businessmen, and they hate Obama vastly more than they love their country.

Stop trying to pretend that Republicans are rational, decent, sane, patriotic people. They're not. They're sociopaths and crackpots. They would burn this country to the ground just to rid it of their political opponents. They would openly embrace negative tax rates for billionaires and big business if Fox and Limbaugh started pushing the notion. And every time you portray them as sane, or seemingly sane, or potentially sane, you make it less likely that the rest of America will address the menace in its midst.

(X-posted at Balloon Juice.)

2012-01-10T08:13:00.001-05:00

WHAT I'D DO RIGHT NOW IF I WERE MITT ROMNEY
(updated)

Obviously, Mitt Romney's "fire people" line has gotten him a lot of negative attention, and other attacks (and self-inflicted wounds) appear to be hurting him. We still don't know to what extent they actually are hurting him, at least among Republican voters. We'll start finding out tonight.

I'm still inclined to play the contrarian -- I think GOP voters have Romney's back on this issue ... or, rather, they would have his back if they actually liked him, or trusted him, or felt in their bones that he'd be the liberalism-smasher and socialism-smiter of their dreams. At this point, it's possible that they're starting to turn away from Romney because they think he won't be their avenging hero after seeing him on the defensive about this capitalism stuff, not because they actually disagree with him in any way. (GOP voters' fantasies are impossibly naive: they really want someone who will never seem to be on the defensive; they imagine someone, essentially the reincarnation of their opium dreams of Ronald Reagan, who can just mow down the liberal/socialist/media/Hollywood/elitist/Muslim/non-white/gun-grabber/RINO enemy without suffering a scratch.)

In any case, the first thing I'd do if I were Romney right now is to get my researchers looking for evidence that the failed companies in Bain Capital's past were brought down by Evil Big Government. The evidence doesn't have to hold up under a lot of scrutiny -- just enough to persuade readers of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Blame it on government! Blame it on taxes! And regulation! Find something Barney Frank did that can be tied in some way, vague or otherwise, to the failure! That's what the GOP rubes want to hear.

And then, after that, if I were Romney, I'd do the right-wing version of Obama's race speech: a speech defending capitalism, and rhapsodizing about its wonders and glories and the beneficence it rains down on mankind, all while focusing on the nobility and heroism of Romney's own capitalist record. Come on -- isn't that what the punters really want from Romney? And don't you think you couldn't throw a rock at a right-wing think tank without hitting some callow Randbot who could write such a speech in his sleep?

Ride the white capitalist steed, Mitt. Get Peggy Noonan to polish the final draft so you sound like a guy running Potter's bank while talking like George Bailey, and even the swing voters in the fall will think it was a hell of a speech. Take advantage of America's woeful lack of class consciousness, dammit!

****

UPDATE: I hedged my bets in what I wrote above, but it's possible this Bain/pink slip/fire stuff isn't hurting Romney at all in the primaries: the latest Suffolk daily tracking poll of New Hampshire actually has him up 4 points, while his main antagonist on this, Newt Gingrich, is down 2. Maybe Romney is rallying the Randroids in his own party and alienating the general public! That would be awesome. (But we'll see about the latter in upcoming general-election polls.)

****

UPDATE: And meanwhile, Romney beats Obama by 2 in a CBS poll conducted January 4-8. A lot has happened since then, including everything discussed above, but this suggests that Romney is a lot more formidable a candidate than we'd like to believe, and perhaps that the public across the board is disturbingly comfortable with Bainism.

2012-01-09T16:10:00.000-05:00

THE WRONG WAY AND THE (BELATEDLY) RIGHT WAY TO HURT ROMNEY IN THE PRIMARIES

If I seem skeptical every time it's suggested that a Monty Burns-esque remark from Mitt Romney is going to hurt him in the Republican primaries, it's because, as Gallup noted last month,

Americans' concerns about the threat of big government continue to dwarf those about big business and big labor, and by an even larger margin now than in March 2009. The 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high, while the 26% who say big business is down from the 32% recorded during the recession. Relatively few name big labor as the greatest threat.

The numbers in the general public have a depressing enough skew, but among Republicans the skew is mind-boggling: a whopping 82% consider big government the biggest threat; 11% say big labor and only 6% say big business. (As recently as 2006, 18% of Republicans said big business, while "only" 68% said big government.) There's your modern GOP. (Though the rest of America isn't much better.)

So when I read about the Romney comment that's got everyone so excited, my response is ... mixed:

"I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don't like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know if someone doesn't give me a good service that I need, I want to say I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me."

The short version -- "I like being able to fire people" -- has the advantage that yesterday's "never get involved in politics if you have to win election to pay a mortgage" doesn't: it's easy to absorb instantly, and an awful lot of people (although, in America, not nearly enough) are going to find it arrogant and chilling.

But that's taking it out of context. The Romney campaign is eventually going to get self-righteous if opponents persist in taking it out of context; Team Romney is going to appeal to media fact-checkers and other fairness cops, and may whine long enough to make an opponent's use of the quote into the real issue. (If it's Obama, I say: don't back down. Politics ain't beanbag, or as Romney would say, "the beanbag.")

In context, Romney's remark just comes off as ... well, odd. I know capitalism-worship is widespread on the right, but while wingnut voters admire rich CEOs, I don't think they think they are rich CEOs. They may think they might be rich CEOs someday, but most know that they aren't. And most of the rest of us know we aren't rich CEOs, either.

Right-wingers, and some others, like the "health care should be between you and your doctor" talking point, the one that has big government evilly interceding in that relationship unless prevented. Never mind that it's big insurance that does most of the evil interceding in the real world -- it's a nice fairy-tale view of health care, and a lot of people fall for it.

But even if they've got you thinking of health care as just another consumer product, you probably don't think of yourself as firing the purveyors of consumer products who sell you lousy stuff, give you bad service, or stiff you on price.

But Americans don't hate big business enough to find the full, in-context quote offensive. They may, however, find it odd.

****

Meanwhile, what the hell is wrong with the entire GOP field if it took till now for this to surface?

Mitt Romney's presidential campaign on Sunday disavowed a flyer that claimed he supported "equal rights" for gay citizens and has long been reported to have been distributed by the Massachusetts Republican during his 2002 campaign for governor.

Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney's chief spokesman, told The Huffington Post that the flyers were not official literature from Romney's 2002 run, despite the fact that they include the tag line "Paid for by the Romney for Governor Committee," on the bottom....

And this?

"When they learn that [Romney] quadrupled the tax on guns in Massachusetts I think it will be just fine in South Carolina," Mr. Gingrich said. "That is the kind of issue that they will instantly understand."

Hurt Gingrich with the party's base voters? This is how you do it -- or should have done it, weeks and weeks ago: with gay-bashing and gun paranoia.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-09T13:43:00.001-05:00

ASININE AT BOTH THE MACRO AND MICRO LEVEL

In The New York Times today, Bill Keller takes more than thirteen hundred words to say something you could text to a friend at a red light, if you and your friend were both idiots: swap Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. It's a dumb idea, it's not remotely original -- and, beyond that, Keller's reasons range from the arguable to (mostly) the incontrovertibly wrong:

... the arguments in favor are as simple as one-two-three. One: it does more to guarantee Obama's re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party's heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.

Let's take #2 first. Why would he be rejuvenated by having his first decision as the 2008 nominee second-guessed for years until pressure from the media led him to reverse it? And how does he get a "mandate" out of this? We all know what qualifies a president for a mandate in the eyes of Republicans: an "(R)" after one's name. These people wouldn't hesitate to block everything Obama wanted if he won 49 states -- and yet their last president, George W. Bush, governed as if he had a mandate even after losing the popular vote by half a million votes and needing the Supreme Court and Brooks Brothers rioters to secure his victory. Really? The next Congress is going to be "less forbidding"? Because Hillary's on the ticket? Is Keller forgetting that Republicans hated Hillary from 1992 until the moment in 2008 when it became clear that touting her might be the best way to throw sand in the Obama gears?

That gets us to #1. Right-wingers stopped attacking Hillary four years ago (after years of vitriol, and after ganging up to attack her in the late-2007 debates) because she became useful as a stick to beat Obama with; to some extent, she still serves that purpose. If she's on his ticket, that ends overnight. She's going to become another America-hating, sixties-linked socialist peacenik who doesn't put America first. Do you think they can't re-tarnish her? They have about 15 years' worth of material. Why assume they couldn't get some of it to stick yet again?

And as for #3: Assuming she still wants to be president, why would she want to be Nixon in 1960 when she could be Nixon in 1968? Sure, being VP makes you the preemptive front-runner for the nomination, but it also makes you a likely loser (Nixon '60, Humphrey '68, Gore '00) -- whereas being out of government service for a while worked out quite well for a lot of recent aspirants (Eisenhower '52, Nixon '68, Carter '76, Reagan '80). So she may as well write a book and chill than spend four years butting heads with Republican congressional sociopaths, which is probably harder than dealing with Ahmedinejad and Daddy and Junior Kim.

2012-01-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

THERE'S A NEW LIBERAL IN THE RACE!

Josh Marshall posts the trailer from a new documentary attacking Mitt Romney; the rights to the film have been purchased by the pro-Gingrich super-PAC, Winning Our Future, which has just received a $5 million cash infusion from billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

I can't see how Gingrich and Adelson could have gotten what they paid for. Watch the trailer. No, let me say that again: Watch the trailer and imagine you're a Republican voter. Imagine you watch Fox News incessantly, and listen to Limbaugh and all the Limbaugh wannabes. Imagine you buy all those damn books the right-wing blowhards put out. How do you react to this?

I don't care how much "capitalism is great, but..." talk prefaces these attacks on Romney's record at Bain -- it's not going to impress Republicans. It's only going to infuriate them. I think this material is much more likely to rally GOP voters to Romney's side.

Thomas Frank has been plugging his new book Pity the Billionaires recently, and one of the points he's been making is that right-wingers think capitalism is perfect. They think it's part of nature -- in other words, they think it was created by God. They love capitalism. They think its punishments are God's punishments of the unworthy.

Maybe I could see this working in New Hampshire -- maybe. But, according to The New York Times, the documentary is going to be cut up into ads that are going to play in South Carolina, where the Republicans are really Republican.

I know that some winger politicians and consultants, like a lot of mainstream pundits, misread the tea party mindset and think the voter base hates evil fat-cat capitalists as much as they hate "big" government. Rick Perry has occasionally made arguments suggesting that he believes this. (And what do you know -- the Times says that Barry Bennett, a onetime consultant to a pro-Perry super PAC, was the guy who got this project rolling in the first place. Bennett has solid right-wing credentials -- former staffer to loony-right congresswoman Jean Schmidt, partner to Mary Cheney, proponent of union-busting SB5 in Ohio -- but he's completely out of tune with the GOP zeitgeist here.)

Now, the Bain stuff will hurt Mitt Romney in the general election -- if the Obama campaign deploys it correctly. I think there's a reasonably good chance it will be deployed correctly. But putting it out there now does Romney no harm -- and it's going to get Gingrich tarred as a RINO.

The only sense I see in this from a right-wing perspective, apart from the fact that it encourages Romney to hone his Bain talking points, is that it has the potential to make Bain seem like old news by the time of the general election. But it really won't be old news, because it'll be fresh for swing voters in the fall, if Team Obama addresses the issue the right way. So, for now, this is good news (or at least not bad news) for Romney.

2012-01-08T22:40:00.000-05:00

NEWT GINGRICH HAS THE SURROGATE HE DESERVES

Newt's being backed by one of the key tea party figures of 2010:

Ron Paul's about to "get on the mother-ship and go back to the mother planet," Rick Perry’s going nowhere unless it's to "hang around the shooting range," and Jon Huntsman clearly loves the Chinese so much he "should move to China."

So says former New York gubernatorial candidate and current Newt Gingrich supporter Carl Paladino.

... He's in [Manchester, New Hampshire] to lend his support to Gingrich, whom he says he has long supported but only backed publicly about a month ago when he discovered to his horror that the New York Republican establishment was lining up behind Mitt Romney....

Here's a thought I'm having.

I realize that Paladino was caught sending a series of racist and porn e-mail forwards.

And I realize he was caught on video threatening a New York Post reporter with physical violence...

And I know he lost to Andrew Cuomo by 30 points in the New York governor's race.

Even so: Don't you think it's entirely possible that, if he ran for president as a Republican in this election cycle, he would have led the polls at least briefly at some point in the last year?

Don't you think he might have been praised for his straight-talking style and lack of political correctness? Don't you think he could have been at least one of the series of anti-Romneys?

In this party, I don't see why not.

2012-01-08T12:45:00.003-05:00

THAT PEDIGREED DOG WON'T HUNT, I'M AFRAID

This is getting a lot of attention, but I don't think it's going to do much harm to Mitt Romney, even though I wish it would:

Mitt Romney recounted some advice from his father, former presidential candiate George Romney, in Sunday's NBC/Facebook debate about running for office: make sure you're set for cash already.

"I happened to see my dad run for governor when he was 54 years old," Romney said. "He had good advice to me. He said never get involved in politics if you have to win election to pay a mortgage. If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, you ought to have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference, and don’t get involved in politics when your kids are still young because it may turn their heads."

Romney later turned the mortgage line on one of his former opponents, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (R-MA), who he ran against unsuccessfully in 1994.

"I was happy that he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me," Romney said....

Here's why this is supposed to be a problem, in Steve Benen's words:

It's an odd line for a candidate regularly accused of out-of-touch elitism. Only those who already have considerable wealth should "get involved in politics"? Really?

Here's the follow-up question: if there's some blue-collar worker in Ohio, who cares about public service and is thinking about asking his neighbors for their vote, should he or she stand aside and allow some rich person to "get involved in politics" instead?

Yes, but for now, Romney is running to win Republican primaries. That means being "an out-of-touch elitist" helps him. "Let them eat cake" moments are good for him. (Being attacked by liberals for "let them eat cake" moments is even better.)

Yes, but what about the general election?

Sorry -- it's too oblique a soundbite to be used effectively in an attack ad. It would have to be boiled down to this:

never get involved in politics if you have to win election to pay a mortgage.

Try that on someone who's never heard it. Does it instantly sound appalling? I think it just takes too long for the brain to go from this to "He's filthy rich" or "He thinks only independently wealthy people should run for office."

Besides, does obviously wealth really hurt Republicans? The last three times a Republican won (or, in 2000, "won") a presidential election, the Republican was named Bush -- not much more needs to be said about that, right? And John McCain may have lost the 2008 election, but do you remember the multiple houses coming up very much during the fall campaign?

A number of commentators are comparing this Romney moment to the time when he challenged Rick Perry to a $10,000 bet. That's probably an apt comparison because, as you'll note, you probably haven't heard a word about that $10,000 bet since its brief moment of notoriety, until now.

I wish this were a problem for Romney, but I don't see it.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-07T23:03:00.000-05:00

IF YOU ASK MITT ROMNEY WHAT TIME IT IS...

If you ask Mitt Romney what time it is, he'll look at his watch, tell you how pleased he is that it's an American watch, probably recite a few lines from some American patriotic songs, then tell you that in Europe they've destroyed the notion of linear time, and if Barack Obama has his way we'll be just like Europe, with utterly useless watches and a completely skewed sense of the hour of the day.

He'll probably never tell you what time it is.

2012-01-07T18:00:00.000-05:00

JON HUNTSMAN, GRUMPY NOT-SO-OLD MAN

January 4:

About two hours before Iowans trekked to their caucuses this evening, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman held what might be seen as a defiant campaign meeting....

And a voter gave him the opening he wanted by asking Huntsman if he had a message for the winner of the Iowa caucuses. "A message for the winner of the Iowa caucuses?" Huntsman asked with a smile. "Welcome to the winner. Nobody cares."

January 4:

On Wednesday, Mr. Huntsman dismissed his Republican rival Mitt Romney's latest endorsement from U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ.)...

"I have great regard for Sen. McCain. I love the man. But it's another example of the establishment piling on. And it seems the more the establishment piles on -- (Bob) Dole, McCain, all the rest -- nobody cares," said Mr. Huntsman....

Today (from a CBS reporter on Twitter):

Huntsman tells me of tnght's debate, which his staffers have said cld make/break him, "Eh, it's just another debate.. nobody cares anymore"

Really? That's his response to everything -- "nobody cares"? What characterization of Huntsman comes to mind when you read that? Angry? Arrogant? Clinically depressed?

Look, I'd be grumpy, too, if I seriously used to think I could win the presidency and then I spent months utterly failing to connect with anyone other than a bunch of elite-media journalists. But if I were Huntsman, by now I'd be back home lounging in front of the fireplace -- I'd have pulled a Pawlenty and quit long ago, before I wasted any more of my time. So my advice to Jon Huntsman is: stop whining and go get a real job.

2012-01-07T14:00:00.000-05:00

HE FELL IN...

Tom Hilton will be on Sam Seder's Ring of Fire radio show at some point this afternoon (the show runs from 3:00 to 6:00 P.M. Eastern time in most locations, though I'm not sure when Tom's going to be on). He'll be following up on his posts here about Ron Paul (and a certain lefty Paul fanboy who shall be nameless). Stations and times for the show are listed here; livestream availability information is here. Go listen.

****

UPDATE: Well, my bad -- Tom told me he was interviewed, but I guess none of the interview ran.

2012-01-07T12:26:00.004-05:00

IN WHICH I DON'T COMPLETELY DISAGREE WITH MAGGIE GALLAGHER

Maggie Gallagher of the gay-bashing National Organization for Marriage writes this (at National Review and in her syndicated column):

The left, which thought it had buried Santorum years ago, is going to go after him with a hatred unlike anyone else has yet generated in this race. They hate him with that special ire reserved for his virtues, not his vices.

They will go after him not just to defeat him, but to smear his good name, to associate it with their own muck, to take a decent and honorable man and try literally to make his name mean mud.

My first response to this was: do the wingers have a keyboard shortcut that generates passages like this? Didn't they say this about Sarah Palin too -- that we especially needed to drag her down because she was so darn virtuous, and we simply could not let such virtue stand?

But I think Gallagher is on to something -- for the wrong reason. We are going after Santorum pretty hard (myself included). Partly it's for the obvious and perfectly understandable reason that he's in the headlines now, as a momentary near-front-runner.

But I also think we're going after him hard because he's such a soft target. He really isn't cagey enough to win the presidency, or even the nomination, and that's largely because he has ideas that are unpalatable to the vast majority of Americans. (Birth control is evil! It's better to have a father in prison than two same-sex parents!) He was beaten like the proverbial rented mule in his last run for elective office, and now he's going to lose the nomination, and in the time between his Senate loss in '06 and his current presidential run he's had little to no impact on the culture. And yet he's been the target of the most successful online attack on a gay-basher. Why him? I mean why him still? He wasn't a driving force on Prop 8 in California. He didn't help bankroll a campaign to remove judges who endorsed gay marriage from the bench in Iowa. (That was Newt Gingrich.) On this and other social issues, including abortion, he's been on the wrong side, but he hasn't been in the arena -- not for years.

So why him? Well, I think sometimes we like going after right-wingers who aren't that powerful. It makes us feel not so powerless. We continue bashing him, and bashing Palin and Michele Bachmann, because they're comic figures, and mostly pretty harmless.

The folks we really have to worry about are the establishmentarians, who still might win this thing, and win the House and Senate as well. The Washington Monthly had a very scary series of articles about how bad things could get if President Obama loses. And even if he wins, the wingers will probably still control (or effectively control) Congress, and threaten to blow everything up for at least two more years. That's what we need to focus our attacks on.

But it's hard to resist attacking a clown like Santorum, or Palin, or Bachmann. It's fun. I think it makes us feel these people aren't all that scary.

2012-01-06T19:30:00.000-05:00

WAIT -- WE'RE ACTUALLY DEBATING WHETHER WHAT GINGRICH SAID IS RACIST?

At times, in trying to judge apparent racial slurs on a case-by-case basis, I've cut people slack whom most other people wouldn't -- but really, how can there possibly be any debate about the intent of this, which is so overt it doesn't even deserve to be described as a dog whistle?

Newt Gingrich's comments about African-Americans and food stamps, made at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire yesterday, have made the expected media rounds -- from Slate to The Daily Beast to The Associated Press to MSNBC -- but the interpretation has changed somewhat along the way.

A reporter on the trail notes that Gingrich frequently says in his stump speeches that he would urge people to demand paychecks instead of food stamps -- a talking point that it is not usually met with great alarm by the media. He also frequently says that he would go to the NAACP convention if it invited him. On Thursday morning, the two points came together when he said he would go to the NAACP convention and explain "why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps."

... For those in the mood to parse, the full transcript of Gingrich's remarks:
The fact is if I become your nominee we will make the key test very simple -- food stamps versus paychecks. Obama is the best food stamp president in American history. More people are on food stamps today because of Obama's policies than ever in history. I would like to be the best paycheck president in American history.

Now there's no neighborhood I know of in America where if you went around and asked people, would you rather your children had food stamps or paychecks, you wouldn't end up with a majority saying they'd rather have a paycheck.

And so I'm prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I'll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps. And I'll go to them and explain a brand new Social Security opportunity for young people, which would be particularly good for African-American males because they are the group that gets the smallest return on social security because they have the shortest life span.

For crissake -- did he or did he not say in so many words that the African-American community is "satisfied with food stamps"? And does he even acknowledge the existence of rural white poverty, or white poverty in any location? And why is Obama "the best food stamp president" and not, say, "the best unemployment insurance president"? Isn't it because Gingrich knows that the best way to reach the reptile portions of certain white racist brains is to mention a government program associated (in those reptile brains) with the alleged sloth and indolence of non-whites, rather than with the misfortune of (good white) folks who would be happy to work if they could find employment?

Oh, and here's a follow-up from the Gingrich camp:

I know that the left has a passion for defending it's right to be the only moral arbiter in America. Therefore, just as happened with Moynihan, if you in fact talk openly and honestly about the failure of liberal institutions and the way they hurt the poor, there becomes a sudden frenzy of a herd of people running screaming, 'racism, racism.' It is a fact that liberal institutions in inner cities have failed the poor. It's a fact that bad schools trap poor children. it's a fact that bad public safety policies lead to the collapse of cities like Detroit....

Five sentences, and in three of them poor is equated to non-white (assuming you read "inner cities" as "non-white urban neighborhoods" and "Detroit" as "scary hellscape full of Negroes," which Gingrich assumes you do).

Gingrich is running as if it's still the time of Willie Horton and the Jesse Helms "Hands" ad. I don't think it still is that time even in the GOP. Except at a relatively low political level, you can still be racist, but you can't seem that racist. You have to give yourself a bit more deniability than this.

2012-01-06T14:00:00.000-05:00

SANTORUM USES ANOTHER CHILD AS A PROP?

I've written a number of posts about Rick Santorum and Gabriel, the deceased newborn he and his wife took home to their kids back in the '90s. I'll admit that I'm one of the people who finds the decision to do this odd -- so, yes, it gives me pause when I read that the American Pregnancy Association suggests that a bonding moment of this kind is a very good idea, and I also feel I have to think twice after reading the words of BooMan, who's had experiences similar to the Santorums' (although the conclusions he draws from them are very different from those of the Santorums).

On the other hand, what's bothered me most about this is that Rick Santorum has seemed to use his deceased son's story as a campaign tool -- please note that the boy was born and died in 1996, but the go-to sources for information on what happened are conversations Santorum had with reporters from The Washington Post and The New York Times Magazine in 2005 ... just as Santorum was about to face the electoral fight of his life in his 2006 bid to retain his Senate seat.

And now, via Joe Klein, I learn this about another of Santorum's children:

In a subsequent pregnancy, Karen gave birth to a daughter with a severe birth defect, who is now 3 years old. On [Iowa] caucus night, six Santorum children wore buttons with a picture of their beloved sister.

I might not be inclined to see that as a cynical use of the girl, who was born with Trisomy-18, if I hadn't seen this LifeNews.com story from October:

Santorum Features Miracle Daughter Bella in New Campaign Ad

Former Senator Rick Santorum released a web video today focusing on the heart and soul of the Santorum family -- his 3-year-old daughter Bella, a special-needs child like so many who are targeted in abortions....

What follows is, yes, a three-and-a-half-minute ad effectively asking you to vote for Rick Santorum because he loves his special-needs child:

The LifeNews story quotes David Brody of Pat Robertson's CBN News organization:

There are not many political candidates who can feature a family member like this and not get accused of using a situation like this for political gain. But that's just not the case here.

Really? You be the judge, folks.

I don't doubt that the Santorums love this daughter and all their other children. But it's clear that they think God wants them to use Bella in order to evangelize for their faith -- and, presumably, in order to advance Rick Santorum's political career, which I'm sure they think is also a good way to advance their faith. Is that exploitation? Again, you be the judge.

And I imagine it's secretly satisfying to the Santorums that people like me respond the way we have, so their fellow believers can learn the full measure of our godless depravity and self-righteously say things like

Democrats are too deep in the bondage of death to feel remorse or shame; these reprobates will never understand the meaning of life.

and

It's times like this when I seriously have to wonder if Leftists are even the same species as the rest of us. Vile does not begin to describe these 'people'.

You're welcome.

2012-01-06T10:55:00.000-05:00

THE WORST ENGLISH-LANGUAGE SENTENCE EVER WRITTEN, FROM DAVID BROOKS

Today's David Brooks column is about Rick Santorum. It includes the following sentence, which gobsmacked me with its sheer awfulness:

America is creative because of its moral materialism -- when social values and economic ambitions get down in the mosh pit and dance.

Wow. That's like one of those horrible accidents you have when you stumble and injure yourself in two separate places -- say, twisting your ankle while cracking your head on a low shelf. You just can't quite tell what the hell happened to you, but you know it's painful.

I'll just ignore the image of social values and economic ambitions getting sweaty and shirtless in the pit and move on to the first assertion. "America is creative because of its moral materialism"? Really? Were morals behind the development of the iPhone? The Model T Ford? The Bo Diddley riff? The collateralized debt obligation? And, of course, Bo, Henry, and Steve are all dead now, so it is in any way correct to say that "America is creative" at all? Is there really all that much creativity left in this country -- at least of the economically ambitious kind -- that doesn't involve the devising of financial instruments?

****

Apart from this, Brooks uses the column to remind us of the differences between his own paternalistic, patronizing, faux-humane conservatism and Santorum's paternalistic, patronizing, faux-humane conservatism. Silly Rick, says Brooks -- he thinks capitalism will function better if we suppress sex among gays and unmarried straight people! Hey, those are my friends! (Well, Brooks doesn't actually include that last bit, but it's implied.) If you'd never read Brooks, you might think he was going to reject moral scolding altogether. But then there he is, a few paragraphs later, giving us his version: capitalism will function better, he says, if we build infrastructure projects ... not because we need the roads and bridges, but because infrastructure-building "allows more people to practice the habits of industry"! The smell of road tar is good for your soul, lazy peasant!

I confess that, after reading Brooks, I still find it hard to tell precisely how Santorum's thesis differs from his own. Which one of them thinks we need a simplified tax code because "social trust is the precondition for a healthy society"? Oh, yeah, that's Brooks. Which one thinks Head Start instruction for children should include lessons on manners? Santorum. It reminds me of the way my eyes glaze over whenever I try to read an explanation of the exquisitely subtle differences in the judicial philosophies of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. What the hell's the difference? On the big stuff, they're going to screw us the same way.

2012-01-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

LIMBAUGH TAKES DAMNING WITH FAINT PRAISE TO A NEW LEVEL

If you're wondering whether Rush Limbaugh, the guiding spirit of the Republican Party, is on board with the party's new conservative standard-bearer, a radio transcript posted at Limbaugh's site suggests that the answer is "er, not really":

Can Santorum Overcome Whiny Pestiness?

RUSH: Adam in Grand Junction, Colorado, as we stay on the phones. Welcome, sir, great to have you here.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Tebow mania size dittos to you.

RUSH: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

CALLER: I think Santorum is the only real conservative left. Although he may have the hair, do you think that he is tall enough or has the looks? I mean in the debate I think he came off like a little whiny pest when he was challenging the other candidates.

RUSH: You're basically commenting on Santorum's petulance. You like him, you think he's the only real conservative, but he came off like a whiny pest.

CALLER: I've always supported him, but I thought he looked awful whiny and baby-like.

RUSH: There were a couple times in the early debates I thought that myself, to be honest with you, Adam, and I thought it was rooted in the fact that Rick Santorum was frustrated that he wasn't getting as many questions, as many opportunities to participate in the debate as Ron Paul was. The people running these debates were looking for ratings, and the kookier, wackier they could go, that means Paul on foreign policy, the bigger they think their ratings are gonna be. And I think he was a little frustrated. As the debates went on I saw that mannerism fade away. I didn't see it. I'd agree with you in the early phases of the debates, but not toward the end.

Wow, Rick -- Rush Limbaugh used to think you were a whiny pest, but now, not so much! Makin' progress!

(And given the distinct possibility that Limbaugh employs fake callers to ask scripted questions, I assume this wasn't a notion Limbaugh just spontaneously happened to discuss.)

Limbaugh goes on to say:

Here's the thing, Adam. We're gonna find out. He's from front and center now. He got a million dollars yesterday. The media is gonna be zeroing in on he's a pro-life extremist. He's racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe. They're gonna be zeroing in on all this and you're gonna find out how he bears up under it. We are all going to find out. He was on with O'Reilly last night, and O'Reilly put him through his paces. O'Reilly said, (paraphrasing) "Look, I don't want to debate these issues with you. I'm not telling you you're right and wrong. I just want to tell you what you're gonna get hit with," and he started peppering Santorum with some quotes that are from Santorum's past about abortion, about race, about welfare, about this or that. And it was interesting to see Santorum parry them, deal with them.

O'Reilly, in his own way, did a service, 'cause this is going to happen. It's Santorum's turn to get the media anal. So you're gonna find out here fairly quick, Adam, whether or not you like his demeanor, whether or not you think he can deal with this in a way that you think is presidential. We all will. We'll see. We'll find out. It's all gonna happen right before our very eyes....

Please note: mistreatment -- what the butt-obsessed Limbaugh calls "the media anal" -- consists of being asked about statements you yourself made in the past. That's so unfair!

2012-01-05T16:02:00.002-05:00

Wendy Kaminer Is Drinking the Flavor Aid

In a piece posted yesteray, she describes Ron Paul as "the only candidate standing up for individual liberties":

But for all his faults, Paul remains the only major candidate, Democrat or Republican, who has taken a stand against our endless wars (including the war on drugs) and the authoritarian national-security state -- the most urgent, dire threat to individual liberty today. It should be but isn't a shock to realize that he is the only major candidate to oppose presidential power to summarily assassinate American citizens.

So it's not surprising that Ron Paul has attracted younger voters than his Republican opponents and the support of the occasional left-wing civil libertarian (notably Glenn Greenwald¹.) But liberal support for Paul is quite weak, and telling: it reflects the dangerous, anti-libertarian drift of today's liberals and progressives. With some exceptions, liberals tend to focus on Paul's alleged bigotry, his newsletters, and his opposition to anti-discrimination laws, while ignoring his lonely support for fundamental liberties.

In case you're wondering, "all his faults" are enumerated in the previous paragraph:

A most imperfect advocate for individual liberty, Paul favors state laws against flag desecration (core political speech) and federal laws against abortion, and he opposes separation of church and state, which is essential to the religious liberty of minorities.

Much shorter Wendy Kaminer: despite Ron Paul's opposition to fundamental individual liberties, Ron Paul is the only candidate standing up for fundamental individual liberties.

Setting aside the obvious point that Ron Paul's "civil liberties" positions aren't actually about civil liberties, I think this is an example (one of many) of an extremely distorted focus on a small handful of civil liberties issues at the expense of a much broader conception of civil liberties (that happens to be more consequential for more people). Look at all the civil liberties she's willing to trade away for the handful of narrow civil liberties issues where she thinks Paul agrees with her: reproductive choice; free political speech; religious liberty. (And she doesn't even mention his issues with the 14th Amendment.) The national security-based encroachments on civil liberties over the last 10 years are pretty bad, but calling them "the most urgent, dire threat to individual liberty today" doesn't pass the bullshit test. (More urgent than millions losing their right to vote? More dire than state-mandated forced childbirth?)

The reason there's so little momentum for undoing some of the post-9/11 abuses is that they directly affect so few people. That's frustrating for those of us who do care about them, but it's also a reality check: there are other civil liberties issues that have a much broader impact, and we can't dismiss them and still claim to support "civil liberties".

(The comments, by the way, are a toxic stew of anti-choice vitriol, Civil War revisionism, declarations of states' "rights", and other flavors of Paulbot lunacy. Kaminer is clearly trying to sell Ron Paul to liberals; the folks weighing in on her side will, thankfully, undermine that effort.)

²Oddly, I haven't seen any angry denunciations from Greenwald for this. Surely he'll accuse Kaminer of lying about him, right?

[And huge thanks to Steve M. for the opportunity to post here on a semi-regular basis. Steve has run one of the most consistently sharp and insightful blogs for about as long as blogtopia has been around, and it's a real honor to be able to share space with him and his other guests.

Also: this morning I did a 15-minute phone interview with Sam Seder that, if they use any of it, will run on Saturday's edition of Ring of Fire Radio. I hope I didn't come off as a complete idiot. If you're listening in and you hear a voice that I totally hate, that'll be me.]

2012-01-05T15:55:00.001-05:00

TUT-TUT, HUBBA-HUBBA

A couple of stories featured side by side on the Fox Nation front page as I type:

Cheesecake and moral scolding: the classic right-wing tabloid cocktail.

2012-01-05T13:39:00.002-05:00

I PERSONALLY PREFER RON PAUL'S EARLIER INDIE WORK

The main takeaway from Suffolk University's new New Hampshire poll (via CNN) is that you can forget about Santorum-upset fantasies (or Paul-upset fantasies or Huntsman-upset fantasies), because Mitt has this in the bag:

The poll showed Romney maintaining his lead with 43 percent of the vote, followed by Paul (14 percent), Newt Gingrich (9 percent), Jon Huntsman (7 percent), while Rick Santorum (6 percent), fresh off an impressive Iowa Caucus second-place showing, managed to climb another point and is now within striking distance of third place.

But here's my favorite nugget from the poll:

[Ron] Paul dropped two points, from 16 percent to 14 percent, despite a third-place finish in Iowa last night....

Paul's drop was primarily due to younger voters ages 18-34, where he dropped from 29 percent to 18 percent.

Really, kids? Ron Paul is, like, so two weeks ago?

Please tell me you're rejecting him because you've learned about the racism, the gay-bashing, and the fundy-coddling anti-abortion position, or, perhaps because you've now fully grasped the Darwinian cruelty of libertarian economics. I really hope you haven't dropped him because he flopped in Iowa and now is just not cool.

2012-01-05T10:46:00.000-05:00

PUT AN L ON RICK'S FOREHEAD

The GOP knives started to come out for Rick Santorum yesterday -- the most prominent line of attack was to damn Santorum as a "big-government conservative," a supporter of activist, interventionist government to achieve right-wing ends (especially religious-right ends). But that dog won't hunt with the base -- insider pundits can come up with all kinds of taxonomies to describe GOP voters, but for the most part those voters don't sort themselves into watertight categories. They hate big government or love it, depending on who's doing the big governmentin', and for what reason. So if Santorum wants to spend tax dollars on forcing the citizenry to love Jesus more and engage in less icky non-marital sex, that's a means of leading us to "freedom" -- and, by contrast, privatized "Obamacare" is still "socialism."

If that line of attack on Santorum came from Team Romney, then Team Romney is going about this all wrong. Frankly, I don't understand why Romney's surrogates don't play their strongest card against Santorum -- which would be stressing the fact that he lost his last election to a damn dirty Democrat by 17 points.

What Republicans voters really want is someone they think will be a boot in the liberal face forever; the policy nuances don't matter all that much. When they backed Gingrich, it was because they thought he was the one most likely to out-debate Obama; they briefly backed Perry because they knew he'd never lost an election; and they liked Cain because, back in the '90s, he confronted Bill Clinton about his health care plan, and they think he was part of the reason it subsequently went down in flames. GOP voters abandoned Gingrich and Cain when they couldn't fend off attacks (from fellow Republicans as well as Democrats and, in Cain's case, the non-political press) -- once Herman and Newt were wounded, they began to seem like weak horses, and could no longer be the object of GOP total-dominance fantasies. And Perry sunk himself with gaffes that made him a laughingstock in the center and on the left.

What the GOP base daydreams about is a conservative conqueror who's a juggernaut, unharmed and unfazed as he (or she) cuts the liberal beast down to size. That's why the highest praise for any wingnut hero is "this is the person liberals fear the most." (That was said repeatedly about Sarah Palin until it became abundantly clear, even to the right, that the exact opposite was true.)

So, Mitt, if you want to be rid of Santorum, just remind Republican voters how big a loser he was in 2006. Don't assume that they know about the size of the loss -- that's inside baseball. Tell them we Antichrists beat him badly. He'll fade instantly.

2012-01-05T07:09:00.000-05:00

AN ANNOUNCEMENT

Tom Hilton, who was a terrific political blogger before he (understandably) grew tired of it all and decided to concentrate on other pursuits, will be contributing occasional posts here at No More Mister Nice Blog on an ongoing basis. He's been part of my guest-blogging team recently and he's stirred up a fair amount of trouble, so I'm glad he'll be here more regularly. Welcome, Tom.

2012-01-04T19:20:00.000-05:00

WHY DOES FOX NEWS HATE PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS?

Fox News entertainment reporter Hollie McKay apparently thinks musicians' intellectual property belongs to the Collective:

Do Musicians Block GOP Candidates From Using Their Songs?

When GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's team was looking for a theme song for his campaign, Kid Rock's hit "Born Free" hit a chord. But instead of doing what countless other politicians before him had done, simply take the song and start blasting it at events, Romney first asked Rock's permission.

...could he have taken this tack because musicians often seem to lean anti-GOP?

Earlier this year, Republican hopeful Michele Bachmann was issued a "cease and desist" letter from rocker Tom Petty's music publisher insisting that she stop playing his "American Girl" at campaign events. The Foo Fighters and John Mellencamp asked John McCain to stop playing their hits during his presidential run in 2008, and McCain settled out-of-court with Jackson Browne last year after the singer-songwriter sued McCain and the Ohio and national Republican committees, accusing them of using his song "Running on Empty" without his permission.

John Hall, a member of the band Orleans, was not happy when George W. Bush played "Still the One" at an event in 2004. The former President was also rebuffed by Tom Petty, John Mellencamp and Sting during his presidential runs for making use of their tracks. And way back in 1984, Bruce Springsteen was unhappy when Ronald Reagan used his hit "Born in the USA."

... On the other hand, Bill Clinton used Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop" in his successful 1992 presidential bid, Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry played Springsteen's "No Surrender" in his 2004 campaign, in 2008 Sen. Barack Obama revived Springsteen's "The Rising," and that same year fellow Democrat John Edwards used Mellancamp's "Our Country." ...

So why do Democrats seem to get more free passes then Republicans?

"Musicians are part of the entertainment industry which is mostly anti-Republican. So lefty performers hate having conservatives use their music," says Vice President of the Business & Media Institute and political commentator, Dan Gainor....

I gather from the tone of this that Gainor (and McKay) don't think they should have the right to refuse permission to use their songs for political reasons -- not even John Hall, who went on to serve for a couple of years as a Democratic congressman from upstate New York, should have that right. Even he should be required to surrender his intellectual property rights to a Republican on demand.

If you wrote the song, shouldn't you (or your heirs and assigns) be able to do as you please with it? If you wrote a country song that a Democrat wants to use and you're a Republican, shouldn't you be free to withhold the rights? I don't have a problem with that. Why would I think you have no right to decide that?

The musicians named above are all left-leaning, as far as I know. That's their right, isn't it? It ain't illegal yet, is it?

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-04T15:49:00.001-05:00

THE DOM PERIGNON IS A BIT FLAT AND THE CAVIAR IS A TOUCH FISHY

I keep running into Iowa post-moterms that are variations on this:

Dems Can Barely Contain Their Glee Over Iowa Results

It's hard to say who was more excited Tuesday night: Rick Santorum, who came within eight votes of beating Mitt Romney or the Democrats watching on their couches at home.

The theory from the Democrats: if that's the best Romney can do, the general election is looking better and better....

Democrats pointed out that ... about 3/4 of caucus-goers last night chose someone other than the man who's been making the case he's the most electable for five years. More embarrassing for Romney: President Obama -- who faced no competition -- actually pulled out a competitive number of votes last night. Democrats say 25,000 Iowans turned out to caucus for the president....

Sorry, but I'm not ready to do a happy dance just because Romney's support is tepid and the turnout didn't suggest an overabundance of GOP energy. Republicans are lukewarm about Romney for the same reason they eventually became lukewarm (or worse) about Bachmann, Trump, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and (to some extent) Paul:

They're spoiled.

Think about it: Every election cycle, Republicans have the opportunity to choose from lots of candidates who promise to do very, very right-wing things the voters want them to do: Cut taxes. Saber-rattle in the Middle East. Gut regulations. Eviscerate the social safety net. Make extraordinarily partisan appointments to the Supreme Court and other federal judgeships. Adopt extraordinarily mean-spirited immigration policies. Restrict abortions. And on and on. Nearly every GOP candidate promises to do most or all of these things. And they mean it -- they will do them.

Now think about Democrats. What do we want? Single-payer health care? Laws that strengthen unions? A genuine, thoroughgoing reversal of military adventurism? Policies that actually reduce economic inequality? Gay marriage? Maybe a Dennis Kucinich will advocate all these things, but he can't be nominated. A minor-party candidate might advocate them all, but that candidate can't win. We can't get what we really want.

But Republicans can get what they want. They get an extraordinary amount of what they want every time they win an election cycle. And it's not good enough for them! They're spoiled! They want more! They propose extraordinary purity tests, and then reject candidates who don't meet them -- or can't meet them retroactively. They develop mad crushes on candidates and then reject them in response to these tests because what they want from every candidate is everything they ever wanted.

It doesn't matter, because once they've got a guy running against Barack Antichrist, they'll fall in line. But really, don't read too much into their current mood. It's just ... ennui.

****

I'm also reading a lot of predictions of GOP doom of this variety:

...Considering his lack of appeal to evangelicals and his late show of interest in the state, it's no surprise that Mitt Romney didn't seal the deal in Iowa. But that means the fight for the Republican nomination will roll on at least through New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida -- which is good news for President Obama.

Think about it. Ron Paul's going to spend the next two or three months attacking Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum's going to spend the next two or three months claiming he's the real conservative, not Mitt Romney. And Newt Gingrich is going to spend the next six months, or six years, getting his revenge by calling Mitt Romney a liar, or worse. And the longer they direct their fire at each other, the better it is for the Obama campaign....

Wasn't that what Republicans were counting on four years ago -- a protracted primary fight weakening their opponent? How'd that work out for them?

2012-01-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

DID I FIND GLENN GREENWALD'S NEXT HERO?
(updated)

Ron Paul stumbled in Iowa, but I wonder if Glenn Greenwald will praise a new hero soon -- Rush Limbaugh, who said this on the radio while most of us were focused on Iowa:

RUSH: I can't believe that nobody's talking about this: The thing Obama signed on New Year's Eve, the new Defense Authorization Act.... Folks, you know what this thing does? It allows the United States military to detain anybody for no reason! They don't even have to charge you. I mean, this is specified. This is not the Patriot Act. This is way beyond. This is total authoritarianism. This is the kind of stuff that exists in Third World banana republics. The government can detain anybody! All they have to do... They actually don't have to do anything.

They just have to say they suspect you of terrorism.

They don't have to prove it. They don't have to have any evidence. They can charge you. They can put you away in a jail. You are not allowed a lawyer. You are not allowed habeas corpus. It's the most amazing thing....

Well, how they gonna define "terrorism"? If you are a liberal Democrat politician might you think that what happens on Fox is terrorism? (pause)...

Are you going to bite, Glenn? Are you going to laud Limbaugh for saying this? Are you going to say that liberals are ashamed to talk seriously about Rush Limbaugh because he points up the contradictions in our political philosophy?

And hell, I might even acknowledge that this was a principled statement on Limbaugh's part -- if I didn't recall what Limbaugh was telling us, oh, say, six years ago, during the Bush administration:

RUSH: I got an e-mail from a friend of mine in St. Louis. "Rush, did you hear what Tim Russert said after Bush's press conference today?" He said, paraphrasing -- and I haven't seen this, so I probably ought to double-check this, but we will. Paraphrasing, Russert said, "People go to war to protect their civil liberties, so isn't counterproductive to take away these liberties while doing it?" All of you out there listening, how many of you think we go to war to protect civil liberties? ...

Ask the families, ask the people who were in the World Trade Center towers right before they were attacked if they are more concerned with the loss of their civil liberties than the loss of their lives. They can't sue Saddam Hussein for loss of civil liberties because they're dead. How can you sue somebody for your civil liberties being taken away when they killed you first? ...

I want to know, give me one person who is in jail who has been falsely charged because of the Patriot Act.... I want to know, what civil liberty is being violated? ...

Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus when he had reporters thrown into prison, because they wrote against him in the union. He threw nine members of the Maryland legislature into prison to prevent that state from possibly pulling out of the union.... Lincoln is one of our greatest presidents ever. Here he deports an agitator to the south. The south, "We don't want the guy." They recognize a traitor when they see one. They send him to Canada. Can you imagine sending Dingy Harry over to Pakistan or Afghanistan? Ha-ha! Can you imagine putting New York Times reporters in jail? ... Folks, folks, I can't tell you what I would do if the president decided to put the press in jail.

... Can you imagine the argument you would get into with your average run-of-the-mill White House reporter if sit them down and say, "You know what Lincoln did to people like you? Put you in jail!" ...

Limbaugh, needless to say, will be delighted when Mitt Romney has the power to detain U.S. citizens in a manner that violates the Constitution. If, somehow there's a progressive Democratic or Democrat-plus-libertarian wave in the 2014 midterms and suddenly we're talking about taking these powers away from President Romney, Limbaugh will call the people making the demand traitors. But now he's upset, because (and only because) Obama's the president.

That's obvious, right? That's probably obvious even to Glenn Greenwald.

Isn't it?

*****

UPDATE: Greenwald responds in comments.

*****

UPDATE: Greenwald pens 4,401 words of self-righteousness directed at every single person on the planet who's written a critical word about him in recent days, me included. (UPDATE: Now with 388 additional words!)

2012-01-04T08:51:00.002-05:00

TRUST ME, RICK: THERE ARE PRESS CLIPPINGS YOU REALLY DON'T WANT TO TAKE SERIOUSLY

This morning, just as I was leaving the apartment, I heard this Rick Santorum soundbite on the radio:

"Let me tell you, what wins in America is bold ideas, sharp contrasts and a plan that includes everyone from across the economic spectrum."

No, Rick, no. Rick, seriously -- you don't want to go there.

Rick Santorum is running for the Republican nomination and he's talking about class? Has he been talking this way all along and I just haven't been listening -- or is he taking that David Brooks column, the one that praised him as a workin'-class hero and not a Harvard Law elitist, way too seriously?

Republican base voters already think conservatism has "a plan that includes everyone from across the economic spectrum" -- that plan is get a freakin' job, deadbeat! Republican base voters support that plan even if they're the ones who don't have jobs. They believe in bootstraps. They believe in the most job-destroying, elitist things Bain Capital has ever done. (Job destruction is job creation!) The only thing they want politicians to do is to crush government and unleash capitalism. The more Santorum says things like this, the better Mitt Romney will do.

Santorum's not talking in a way that can possibly get him the Republican nomination -- he's talking in a way that can get him deep love from the mainstream media, and (in all likelihood) a non-Fox media job (if he wants one) after he drops out of the race. I expect to see him on the Washington Post op-ed page by April.

2012-01-04T08:12:00.002-05:00

THIS IS THEIR FINAL FIT, THEIR FINAL BELLYACHE

Well, this, from The New York Times, seems like exactly the wrong conclusion:

Mitt Romney's quest to swiftly lock down the Republican presidential nomination with a commanding finish in the Iowa caucuses was undercut on Tuesday night by the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum, who fought him to a draw on a shoestring budget by winning over conservatives who remain skeptical of Mr. Romney.

Romney's quest for a quick win was undercut? The hell it was. The only outcome within the realm of possibility that truly could have thrown Romney off stride was a finish in third place, several points behind both Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. That didn't happen. And Paul, the stronger and better organized of the two remaining anti-Romneys, didn't even participate in the photo finish (he was three points behind the leaders).

What that means about Ron Paul is that even though he can do well (at least in states where independents and/or Democrats can vote in the GOP contests), he can't come truly close to winning even in a small state where he's got his full machine deployed. I really wasn't sure if that was true -- going into last night, as he appeared to be slipping in the polls, I thought he'd overperform. I thought he was the zeitgeist candidate. I thought the polls might be underestimating the size of his cult. But he couldn't pull it off. So he's certainly not going to pull it off in New Hampshire or Nevada, and I don't believe he has the juice to compete in a big state.

And Santorum? I've watched dour, earnest, underfunded purists try to challenge a grinning front-runner who has a slick, machine-like operation -- in '92, Bill Clinton had to deal with two such candidates, Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown. Not only do the challengers run out of money, they stop motivating their followers, in part because their campaigns offer no fun. It's all eat-your-vegetables.

Things could have gone very differently if the oh-Lord-does-it-have-to-be-Romney? vote hadn't been split so many ways last night -- although the guy who could have consolidated that vote and moved on to other states with money and energy was Rick Perry, and he decided to call Social Security a Ponzi scheme before getting into a race that's often decided in Florida, so why am I even talking about him?

And things would be different if we weren't about to take Romney's inevitable blowout victory in New Hampshire so seriously -- for the love of God, people, Paul Tsongas won there in '92. Winning this damn thing as a Massachusetts resident simply shouldn't count.

Paul is going to fade -- he can't do well where doing well requires big media buys rather than shoe leather, and he can't win anywhere they want to kill a lot of brown people for Jesus. And Santorum can't do well except in states that match the latter description -- he's about to become, to Romney, what Hillary Clinton was to Barack Obama in '08 after Obama had the race wrapped up: the candidate who picks up the socially conservative rural voters and loses everyone else, except he'll be a flat-broke version of Hillary.

And no, don't even mention Jon Huntsman -- sure, maybe he'll (barely) crack double digits in New Hampshire, but he still does self-sabotaging things like this, as if the point of his campaign is that he's shorting himself on Intrade:

Are you crazy, Jon? No compromise with Obamacare! You call yourself a Republican?

So the coronation is coming. The only question is whether Romney will be able to hold the base in November. I think any libertarian or Guns-n-Jesus minor-party candidate out there will have a chance of hurting him, though the GOP Establishment Noise Machine may well crush those candidates just the way Gingrich and Cain were crushed. So I think we may have our race, and quite possibly it will be a simple two-man race.

****

Oh, and please, don't anticipate that Gingrich will use his remaining time in the race to destroy Romney. Sure, he'll try, but he won't succeed -- he's now seen by the base as the weak horse, so whatever he says is a joke. And please don't think (as a lot of people seem to think, to judge from Twitter last night) that Romney will now be harmed by a lot of opposing candidates demanding that he release his tax returns -- some may ask, but his refusal to do so is probably very appealing to the base, which hates campaign reform laws and any questioning of wealth.

2012-01-03T16:37:00.000-05:00

O, BOBO, WHERE ART THOU?
(And thou, too, Ezra?)

It doesn't surprise me when something David Brooks has written gets up my nose, but it upsets me when Ezra Klein praises Brooks:

Here's what Ezra is seconding, from Brooks's song of praise to Rick Santorum:

If you took a working-class candidate from the right, like Santorum, and a working-class candidate from the left, like Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and you found a few islands of common ground, you could win this election by a landslide. The country doesn’t want an election that is Harvard Law versus Harvard Law.

Let me respond by saying, first, that I think twice every time I play the class card on this blog using my own background. It's appropriate in this case, however: I'm a truck driver's kid, my parents didn't go to college, and now I have an Ivy League sheepskin and I've become one of those awful liberal sophisticates who uses words like "artisanal." In other words, I've been on both sides of this cultural divide. And I'm telling you that the economic non-elites have voted for plenty of elitists in their time -- where I grew up, the most revered presidents were JFK and FDR. The 99% can be manipulated into thinking that a candidate is too elite for them -- it still sticks in my craw that George H.W. Bush, of all people, had the unmitigated gall to say that immigrant's son Michael Dukakis had policies that were "born in Harvard Yard's boutique." (And it sticks in my craw even more that voters fell for that argument.) But the fact of the matter is, we vote for a lot of millionaires in this country -- we don't have much choice -- and most of us are just hoping one or two of them have some freaking empathy. And those of us on the left side of the ledger know there's no inevitable correlation between wealth and empathy -- grocer's daughter Maggie thatcher had none, for instance.

Brooks thinks Santorum is some sort of populist because he rejects certain aspects of right-wing laissez-faire. But now I'm going to play another card from my life, because I was baptized and confirmed in Santorum's Catholic Church before I went atheist, and I can see what his so-called concern for the downtrodden largely consists of:

A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, "individual development accounts," publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in "every school in America" (his italics), and more. Lots more.

Though he is a populist critic of Big Government, Santorum shows no interest in defining principled limits on political power. His first priority is to make government pro-family, not to make it small. He has no use for a constitutional (or, as far as one can tell, moral) right to privacy, which he regards as a "constitutional wrecking ball" that has become inimical to the very principle of the common good. Ditto for the notions of government neutrality and free expression. He does not support a ban on contraception, but he thinks the government has every right to impose one.

Yes, I might agree with Santorum on some of those programs, as might Sherrod Brown, but the full list suggests that he focuses on what he focuses on primarily to prove that Jesus knows what's best for you and Rick Santorum knows what Jesus thinks is best for you. But, of course, this is what Brooks likes about Santorum:

His economic arguments are couched as values arguments: If you want to enhance long-term competitiveness, you need to strengthen families. If companies want productive workers, they need to be embedded in wholesome communities.

Yeah, right -- that's why East Cowflop, Mississippi, with eighty-seven churches per person, is the economic dynamo of the planet, while New York and San Francisco are still struggling to emerge from the Third World.

BooMan has a lot more on Santorum's ultimately heartless list of policy positions -- though let me add that Santorum's not merely an advocate of ending Medicare as we know it, he is the most unabashed defender of Paul Ryan in the GOP presidential field. Not a lot of common ground with Sherrod Brown there. Oh, and as BooMan notes, Brown went to Yale (and is, by the way, a doctor's son).

2012-01-03T11:30:00.000-05:00

A PREVIEW OF PRESIDENT ROMNEY'S FIRST HUNDRED DAYS?

A lot of people look at the unpopularity of GOP governors in Florida, Maine, and elsewhere, and look at some of the successes their opponents have had in such states as Ohio and Wisconsin, and assume that Republicans know they overreached in 2011.

Apparently not:

A Gathering Storm Over 'Right to Work' in Indiana

Nearly a year after legislatures in Wisconsin and several other Republican-dominated states curbed the power of public sector unions, lawmakers are now turning their sights toward private sector unions, setting up what is sure to be another political storm.

The thunderclouds are gathering first here in Indiana. The leaders of the Republican-controlled Legislature say that when the legislative session opens on Wednesday, their No. 1 priority will be to push through a business-friendly piece of legislation known as a right-to-work law....

Right-to-work laws prohibit union contracts at private sector workplaces from requiring employees to pay any dues or other fees to the union. In states without such laws, workers at unionized workplaces generally have to pay such dues or fees....

This is presented as "business-friendly" legislation, but at least as important is the fact that it's Republican-friendly legislation. It's pathetic that the very existence of even a nominally liberal major political party in America depends on the continued payment of union dues by a certain percentage of the population, but that's the way it is, given the way money works in our politics -- and the GOP and its allied fat cats know that the Democratic Party can literally be destroyed, or turned into an ineffectual minor party, if right-to-work spreads, in combination with other assaults on Democratic voters and funding.

My prediction? We'll see this nationally after President Romney and a GOP House and Senate are sworn in in 2013 -- there's going to be a drive for a national right-to-work law, and it'll go through so fast no opponent will have properly prepared for it. All the insider journalists and pundits will be shocked that this will be Romney's first major effort as president. (He never mentioned this when we were schmoozing on the campaign plane!)

Maybe it can't happen. Maybe even a terrified Democratic Party, having lost the Senate and the presidency, will still be able to muster enough votes in the Senate to filibuster this. But that assumes the GOP won't suspend or eliminate the filibuster after taking over the Senate -- not a safe assumption.

I believe the GOP's power brokers -- Murdoch, Rove, the Kochs -- have nothing less in mind than turning America into a one-party state. I don't see why they couldn't accomplish that with a few more GOP-friendly campaign finance rulings, a national RTW law, more voter ID laws, and perhaps a Supreme Court overturning of birthright citizenship, which would make it difficult for many U.S.-born Hispanics to register and vote just as Hispanics numbers swell in America. Yeah, I'm being apocalyptic here, but I really don't think Republicans are just playing around. I wouldn't put anything past them.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

2012-01-03T07:57:00.000-05:00

SANTORUM MAY HAVE BEEN FALSELY ACCUSED OF RACISM -- THOUGH APPARENTLY HE DOESN'T CARE
(updated)

You're going to say I'm naive, but I'm not at all certain that Rick Santorum said what CBS claims he said:

At a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa on Sunday, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum singled out blacks as being recipients of assistance through federal benefit programs, telling a mostly-white audience he doesn't want to "make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money."

Answering a question about foreign influence on the U.S. economy, the former Pennsylvania senator went on to discuss the American entitlement system - which he argued is being used to politically exploit its beneficiaries.

"It just keeps expanding -- I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don't sign up more people under the Medicaid program," Santorum said. "They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That's what the bottom line is."

He added: "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."

Is that really what he said?

I'm not sure I hear "black people's lives." I hear "li-- people's lives." Or perhaps he starts saying both "people's" and "lives" at the same time and it comes out sounding like "pli--," which is close enough to "bla--."

Now, why would I believe this?

In large part because (as is made clear above) Santorum's just finished telling an Iowa audience -- a lily-white Iowa audience -- "They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote." I emphasize the word "you" because, as is clear from the clip, he emphasizes the word "you." He's saying that the satanic liberal welfare state is so wickedly all-consuming that it wants to enslave everyone.

This is a favorite right-wing talking point: that government is making us all dependent, and that that's destroying American civilization. Here's John Stossel's version:

Government is taking us a long way down the Road to Serfdom. That doesn't just mean that more of us must work for the government. It means that we are changing from independent, self-responsible people into a submissive flock. The welfare state kills the creative spirit.

F.A. Hayek, an Austrian economist living in Britain, wrote "The Road to Serfdom" in 1944 as a warning that central economic planning would extinguish freedom....

According to the Tax Foundation, 60 percent of the population now gets more in government benefits than it pays in taxes. What does it say about a society in which more than half the people live at the expense of the rest? Worse, the dependent class is growing. The 60 percent will soon be 70 percent....

Do we want a culture of takers or makers? ...

And this is regarded by right-wingers as a deliberate strategy of enslavement. Here's The American Spectator's Peter Ferrara:

Takers vs. Makers

... the Democrat party is throwing in the towel on economic growth and prosperity, because even Obama's people recognize they cannot credibly sell themselves as delivering on that. What they are going to sell in 2012 is taxes and redistribution from those that have more to buy the votes of those they think will sell their vote for government handouts. That marries perfectly Marxist philosophy with Chicago political machine politics.

You see this "makers and takers" formula all over Wingnuttia -- here's a much-quoted book titled Makers and Takers: How Wealth and Progress Are Made and How They Are Taken Away or Prevented; here's another, titled Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less ... and Even Hug Their Children More Than Liberals. Here's the "takers/makers" formula in Forbes. Here it is from Stephen Moore in The Wall Street Journal. Here it is even from Andrew Sullivan.

Santorum didn't use those words, but he's tapping into that notion. I think it comes off as even more evil and sinister to right-wingers because everyone seems potentially enslavable. It's Invasion of the Freedom Snatchers!

****

And yet, when questioned about it, Santorum didn't deny saying "black":

When asked about the comments in an interview with "CBS Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley, Santorum said he wasn't aware of the context of his remark, but mentioned that he had recently watched the movie "Waiting for Superman," which analyzes the American public education system through the stories of several students and their families. (The students and their families portrayed in the movie represent several races.)

"I've seen that quote, I haven't seen the context in which that was made," Santorum told Pelley, of the Sunday remarks. "Yesterday I talked for example about a movie called, um, what was it? 'Waiting for Superman,' which was about black children and so I don't know whether it was in response and I was talking about that."

Santorum stressed that he wants to make life better for Americans regardless of race.

"Let me just say that no matter what, I want to make every lives [sic] better - I don't want anybody - and if you look at what I've been saying, I've been pretty clear about my concern for dependency in this country and concern for people not being more dependent on our government, whatever their race or ethnicity is."

That's all the proof most of you will need. I'm still not sure he remembers what he said correctly -- and obviously it doesn't matter to him. But I still think -- like most modern right-wingers -- he's folded old-school racism into a batter that's mostly hatred of the Evil Liberal Monolith. And I think his audience hears it that way as well.

In any case, it's hard to be overtly racist these days -- racists nowadays use coded language and then believe their coded talk is sincere and literal. And even my version of what Santorum said carries with it the implication that government will reduce even you, upstanding white person, to the status of one of them.

****

UPDATE: Here's a clip of Santorum saying in Iowa yesterday, "You have Medicare driving the entire health care system in this country and it's crushing it." That strikes me as very consistent with the dependency/makers/takers narrative, and not with the "black people's lives." (And no, I don't have any expection that I'll persuade you by saying that.)

****

UPDATE: For what it's worth, Mediate's Tommy Christopher also doubts that Santorum said "black."