IT'S NOT THAT THE COLORS AREN'T THERE, IT'S JUST IMAGINATION THEY LACK

In what's being treated as a big story at Politico this morning, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen tell us that they're lifting their heads out of the Beltway-infighting gutter so they can talk about about some wonderful, fresh, big-picture policy ideas -- ideas that would not merely extricate us from our current crises, but would lead to an economy that thrives. They're doing this with the help of a panel of experts:

Most politicians in the most powerful positions in Washington agree in private that there are a half-dozen or so big things they could and should do that could put a rocket booster on the U.S. economy -- but they are too timid to say it in public.

This is the clear takeaway from conversations we have had over the past three months with top lawmakers, officials, their senior aides and the CEOs who advise and lobby all of them. Many of the conversations were private but many were not.

A "rocket booster" for the economy? Wow! Ideas people are "too timid" to talk about in public? Give us the inside skinny! "Big things" we can do -- if only we have the courage? Where do I sign up?

Alas, the imaginations on display are so impoverished that the "big things" being proposed are ... mostly the same tired, eat-your-vegetables, shaft-the-general-public ideas we're always getting from our political and fat-cat betters:

The current tax-and-spending debate only flirts with what these insiders say needs to be done. Instead, top White House and congressional leaders talk privately of the need for tax reform that goes way beyond individuals and rates; much deeper Social Security and Medicare changes than currently envisioned....

You see where this is going.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said long-term commitments to measures such as tax reform ... would provide a "certainty premium" that would help bring corporate cash off the sidelines....

It starts with taxes.... top Republicans and Democrats agree the best thing for the economy in the long-term is to simplify the Tax Code, reduce rates and end loopholes -- not just for individuals but also for corporations....

Tax reform would raise more money to pay down the debt and help create the "certainty premium" Moynihan spoke of.

Can we please acknowledge the likely consequences of a thorough tax-code overhaul? Loopholes of all kinds, we're told, would be put on the table -- yours, mine, Mitt Romney's, JPMorgan Chase's. But armies of lawyers and lobbyists will have a place at the table throughout the overhaul process, with the sole mission of protecting the loopholes JPMorgan and Mitt Romney love most. You and I won't have a similar army. When the dust settles, we'll learn just how many of their loopholes magically survived, and how many of ours didn't -- and they'll also get rate cuts. (We'll get rate cuts, too, I guess -- we're always told that everyone should -- but ours won't make up for what we've lost.)

And, of course, we have to give up a wee bit more to load the fuel onto this rocket of an economy:

Nearly every lawmaker and staffer will tell you privately that they know the Social Security retirement age needs to go up, the rate of growth of benefits needs to be slowed on a sliding scale that protects the poor, the cap on income subjected to the tax that finances the program needs to rise and the rich should get smaller or no payout from the program.

They will also tell you Medicare, which is on pace to be insolvent in 12 years, is a much, much bigger mess.... Ultimately, many Americans will have to get less generous benefits that start to kick in at an older age -- and those changes need to start a decade from now.

There's this, and there's, well, "Drill, baby, drill!":

The explosion of domestic natural gas and oil production is arguably the biggest overlooked story of the past year. The International Energy Agency now projects the United States could blow by the Saudis by 2020 to become the leading oil producer in the world. The freshest sign: Monthly oil production in September hit a 15-year high. The reason is simple: the explosion of “fracking” to extract energy from abundant shale rock foundations.

No doubt, there are environmental concerns, especially for drinking water.

Yes, no doubt. But, again, rocket fuel, baby! (Maybe we can use the drinking water as rocket fuel.) Just give up your loopholes, and some of your Social Security benefits, and some of your Medicare benefits, and clean drinking water ... and we'll be on our way to Easy Street!

Remember, this isn't intended to be a "hard choices" kind of piece. This is Politico being optimistic. This isn't Politico saying, "Do these painful things, and eventually we'll see a light at the end of the tunnel." VandeHei and Allen are telling us that this is the light at the end of the tunnel.

Which it is, of course, for the fat cats and most of the pols. They know they're in clover if they just break us -- get us used to the idea that we have to have to accept less, while they get more.

You want my plan for rocket-propelling the economy? Let me quote Charlie Pierce's First Rule of Economics:

Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money.

Act according to that. That would be rocket fuel. People can't buy your stuff, fat cats, if they've got no money to buy it with. Solve that problem, and that would give you a real friggin' "certainty premium."

IN RETROSPECT, 40% SHOULD HAVE BEEN 0%

Republicans are in the process of turning Michigan into a right-to-work state. The union movement has been going downhill for decades, and Ronald Reagan gave unions one of the bigger shoves when he took on the air traffic controllers in his first term -- but I suppose the fact that Republicans haven't tried to flip strong union states to right-to-work until recently, combined with the fact that Democrats have been all talk and no action with regard to strengthening labor, has led some union workers to be unsure which party best represented their interests.

And now it's clear what a mistake that was. Assaults on unions since 2010 have all come from the GOP. And yet according to the 2012 exit polls, 40% of voters who have a union member in the household voted for Mitt Romney. In House votes in 2010, 37% of voters from union households voted GOP. In the 2008 election, 39% of voters from union households voted for McCain.

These aren't trivial numbers. I assume union households include households with unionized retirees, because this year union-household voters were 18% of the electorate; they were 17% in 2010, and 21% in 2008.

So approximately 40% of union-household voters vote GOP every year, and they're about 18% of the electorate? That's about 7% of the electorate picking the Republicans despite the presence of a union worker in the household. If that's going on at the state level, how many GOP governors and state legislators are winning based on union-household support?

Well, this has to stop. Union-household support for the GOP should be zero. It's not individual Republicans who are literally trying to destroy what's left of the union movement in America -- it's essentially the entire party.

Maybe that wasn't clear until now, but it's got to be clear from now on. Members of union households, these people hate you. Never give them another vote.

FOR REPUBLICANS, PAIN HAS A PURPOSE, PART II

Media Matters:

Fox News is encouraging Republicans to once again hold up a routine increase in the debt ceiling to exact spending cuts in deficit reduction negotiations with Democrats, though the same tactic previously cost the government billions and resulted in a credit-rating downgrade.

The word "though" in that sentence is incorrect. It should be "because."

Fox News is encouraging debt-ceiling brinkmanship because a prolonged fight over the debt ceiling would cause harm to the economy -- harm that Fox News thinks would be blamed on Democrats, because the president is a Democrat, and because the people at Fox and other Republicans have portrayed Democrats as the party of government.

This is not recklessness -- it's calculation, or possibly miscalculation, based on naked self-interest.

See also my previous post.

TO REPUBLICANS, PAIN HAS A PURPOSE

Ezra Klein thinks the GOP's obsession with cutting Medicare is highly illogical:

There's no particular conservative -- or even non-conservative -- policy goal that raising the Medicare eligibility age advances.

Raising the Medicare eligibility age doesn't increase competition in Medicare... It doesn't reduce national health spending ... it increases it. It doesn't force seniors to act as more discerning consumers of health care.... It doesn't substantially pare back "the nation of takers," as many of the 65- and 66-year-olds thrown off Medicare will enter the exchanges or be caught by Medicaid.

... Raising the Medicare eligibility age really will hurt some seniors.... there are a number of middle-income seniors who make enough that they won't get much help from Obamacare, who are sick enough that they won't get a good deal from insurers, and who may end up going uninsured (after paying the individual mandate's penalty) or straining under the cost of health insurance.

Ezra thinks Medicare cuts are just (in Nancy Pelosi's words) "a trophy that the Republicans want":

For Republicans, it's a signal that they won something big on entitlements. In a party that's confused about where to go on Medicare, it at least proves they're going in a direction Democrats hate.

Yes, Republicans are always motivated by hatred for Democrats -- but there's more going on here than that.

Republicans clearly seem to think that hurting people by making government program function less effectively is a winning strategy for them. They've branded themselves as the party that says government is bloated and inefficient and therefore odious and hateful, while they've branded Democrats as the party that believes in more and more government no matter what. Democrats do have more faith in government than Republicans do, at least as a means of helping ordinary Americans -- so Republicans believe that if they can impede the government's ability to help ordinary citizens, Democrats will be blamed.

And that's especially true if tales of benefit cuts can be couple with tales of what seems like misdirected government money -- especially if it seems to be going to groups certain voters despise or distrust. If Medicare gets cut and Fox News finds tax money going to, oh, y'know, an ex-ACORN employee, even if there's no connection and the dollar amounts aren't even remotely comparable and the grant is thoroughly legitimate, that's a win for the GOP. Even a story about a $100,000 grant to do a (perefctly legitimate) study cow flatulence can be played off against, say, billions of dollars in Medicare cuts, and Republicans believe Democrats lose whenever that happens.

So there's more than just a desire to screw Democrats here. This is how Republicans try to win voters' hearts and minds. I don't know if it's working now, but it's worked for them for a long time.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THERE'S NO BILLION-DOLLAR THUMB ON THE SCALE

Support for gay marriage is increasing at a remarkable rate -- a new Politico/George Washington University/Battleground poll finds plurality support (40%) support for marriage equality and 30% support for civil unions. "One in five surveyed admitted to changing their view on same-sex marriage in the last few years," we're told.

And yesterday a couple of right-wing pundits rejected gay marriage as a culture war issue, on ABC's This Week. One was George Will:

Washington Post columnist George Will ... dismissed the potency of the issue for Republicans. "There is something like an emerging consensus," he said. "Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying. It's old people."

Mary Matalin scapegoated a different group:

MATALIN: ... People who live in the real world, say, the greater threat to the civil order are the heterosexuals who don't get married and are making babies. That’s an epidemic in crisis proportions. That is irrefutably more problematic for our culture than homosexuals getting married....

This is what happens when the billionaires who own Republican politicians and the right-wing commentariat decide that a wedge issue doesn't merit their support. Contrast this with austerity: GOP pols and commentators are going to insist on pursuing austerity even though we're in a persistent economic downturn because the right-wing billionaires want us to. And even though the public wants to tax the rich, much of the plutocrat-funded right-wing propaganda is still working: a great deal of the public still thinks cutting spending and getting the debt and deficit down are good ideas. But Republican pols and commentators are beginning to back away from resistance to gay marriage, and public opposition is beginning to fade -- and I think it's because right-wing billionaires aren't manufacturing opposition to marriage equality.

David Koch supports gay marriage. So does hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, a major backer of the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future who's also been a prominent supporter of marriage equality in New York State and Maryland. So do a lot of Big Kahunas on Wall Street.

It's still OK for the likes of Matalin to demonize single parents of modest means -- the plutocrats want the have-nots to be at war with the have-even-lesses, because that helps keep us from turning our attention to billionaire parasites like themselves. But gay people who want to get married? Fat cats have relatives and employees who fall into that category. So they're not encouraging us proles to scapegoat gays anymore.

The point I'm trying to make is that a lot of what we see as "heartland" right-wing anger only seems to be as strong as it is because rich right-wingers have made a concerted effort to gin up anger at specific targets. When the plutocrats back off a target, what seemed to be "grassroots" anger magically seems to dissipate, doesn't it?

DO THESE PEOPLE HAVE ANY SELF-AWARENESS?

The Instapundit Twitter feed directs me to this blog post by Boston right-wing talker Michael Graham:

Republicans Are George Bailey, Obama Is Mr. Potter

... Agree or disagree with their policies, the GOP has been offering ideas to actually try and solve the problems of a slow-growth economy and a collapsing entitlement state. You may think they're idiotic solutions, but the Republicans are trying.

In a sense, they're like "It's A Wonderful Life's" George Bailey at the Bailey Building and Loan calling out to the panicked depositers "let's stick together and get through this!" Republicans are, at some subconscious level, counting on good sense or common decency to triumph and for people to pull together and make a serious attempt to fix thinks.

You did notice in the move that George was a chump who had to rely on charity to bail him out, while Mr. Potter ended up with the lost $7 grand, right?

... Like Old Man Potter, President Obama is out to break his competition, not come to a settlement. Republicans have made offer after offer, only to be greeted with laughable (literally) demands for total surrender.

... President Obama is a political capitalist. He's not looking for a bipartisan buy-in, or a shared burden. Like Mr. Potter, he wants to win everything, and he wants the hapless "let's all get along" George Bailey to lose everything.

The only difference is that the liberal-dominated media are twisting the plot so that Obama Potter is the good guy.

First it was the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity claiming to be on the George Bailey side of this fight, and now it's this clown, with Ol' Perfesser Reynolds nodding assent. Is it pure cynicism? Or are these people simply oblivious to the fact that they're on the side of the overdogs? Or do they just like to whine and play victim?

YOU THINK WE HAVE A SECESSIONIST MOVEMENT NOW?

It's hard for me to imagine that the Roberts Court, of all Courts, would be the one to declare that marriage equality is a constitutional right. It's hard for me to believe that the Court would announce its intent to consider the question of gay marriage a month after Barack Obama's reelection if Roberts and his Republican allies didn't see this as the last chance to lock in a right-wing viewpoint on this question as Supreme Court precedent before Obama gets to change the ideological makeup of the Court (and lower courts).

But even many wary supporters of marriage equality seem to think the time is now:

"There is no question that it is a risk," said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. "If they nationalize it and reject it, that's going to take decades to come back to the court."

... Mr. Newsom said he trusted the counsel of the high-profile lawyers for the plaintiffs, David Boies and Theodore B. Olson, that this time and this court were right for the case.

"I'm going to defer to their expertise rather than my instincts," Mr. Newsom said. "I think it's worth the risk."

On the other side -- even though I think it's unlikely -- I wonder about the consequences of a win. I agree with this woman:

Angela Gabriel, 43, a lesbian in Atlanta, said she was cautiously optimistic that the court would rule in favor of same-sex marriage, but was concerned about the ramifications of that outcome in socially conservative regions.

"Georgia is just not as progressive or forward-thinking or accepting of everyone,"' she said. "There would be a lot of pushback."

I really think a constitutional enshrinement of a right to gay marriage in every state would set off a backlash -- in deep-red states, but not limited to those states -- at least as fierce as the one against Roe v. Wade, and possibly as fierce as the one against civil rights in the fifties and sixties.

And I don't know how I feel about that. If we could go back, would we want to give up any of the legal advances of the civil rights era just to avoid the violence, and then the mass exodus of Southern whites to the GOP, with the awful results from Nixon through Bush and the tea party? No -- but we see that there was a cost. If we could go back, would we want to give up Roe to avoid the anti-abortion backlash, the violence, the relentless chipping away at abortion rights? I'm not sure -- haven't the antis chipped away at abortion rights and made abortion effectively legal only in a handful of states, just as it probably would have been without Roe?

I worry that this could be worse -- we have a horrible economy, and a right-wing population that's told 24/7 that its opponents are pure evil. If they have to allow gay marriage in Alabama and Mississippi and South Carolina (and Kansas and Oklahoma and Missouri), there's going to be unrest in the streets, there's going to be serious talk of secession, and I think there's going to be violence. Is it worth it? Well, maybe that's an appropriate cost. But I think there would be a cost. It's going to get ugly.

UM, GOVERNOR, THAT'S NOT THE AURORA RISING BEHIND YOU

New Jersey's governor, Chris Christie, got a lot of sympathy for what Sandy did to his state, and got a lot of attention for his outreach to President Obama after the storm hit. But don't forget that when it comes to climate change, he's a Republican:

In his first year [as governor], Christie closed the Office of Climate Change and Energy which had been created and given top-level priority under Jon Corzine.

It was run by the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). Its mission was to ready the state to handle more severe storms, heat and rising sea levels.

"So none of this work is getting done," said Bill Wolfe, a 30-year-veteran of DEP and now a harsh critic.

And when you ask Christie about climate change, he does an excellent imitation of Marco Rubio talking about the age of the earth:

Thrift is an issue Christie is comfortable talking about. Climate science isn't. As Sandy was bearing down on the region , WNYC's Bob Hennelly asked Christie if the Governor was discussing the increasing severity of storms with climate change scientists.

"No, that’s over my head.," Christie replied.

That's been Christie's approach to questions about climate change. Once he said he was "skeptical." When he was pressed about the increasing severity of storms, he maintained he’s a lawyer, not a scientist.

"But that's what we have an academic community to do is to think about those bigger issues and if those experts have an answer for me, my door is always open to listen to them," Christie said.

Several of the people who lost their jobs when the Office of Climate Change was cut now work in academia....

By the way, despit the governor's professed fondness for thrift, this may have cost New Jersey some real money:

The state's transit agency that answers to Christie, New Jersey Transit, acknowledged this week it lost $100 million in trains and equipment. Some critics are linking NJ Transit's decision to store trains in low lying rail yards during the storm to its lack of a climate change preparation plan. The agency said, before the flood, it had figured that there was an "80 to 90 percent chance" there wouldn't be flooding.

That turned out to be a losing gamble....

I think there are a lot of reasons why Christie could have trouble if he seeks the GOP presidential nomination -- his embrace of Obama, the likelihood that he might not have the physical endurance for a long campaign, a crowded field -- but he's much more skilled at shaking an Etch A Sketch than, say, Mitt Romney (he's running for reelection in his blue state next year, and now he looks like a shoo-in), so I wonder if John Cole is right to worry about him four years from now. Here's part of what John wrote yesterday after Christie's Jon Stewart interview:

I just watched him on the Daily Show, and the confidence and likability he exudes is contagious. He leans forward, is aggressive, smiles, is easy with the banter, and even folks who agree with nothing he stands for him like him- see also, Jon Stewart.

... I hope to FSM I am wrong and I hope Christie never holds a higher office than Governor of New Jersey, but I honestly think Democrats dismiss this guy at their own peril. He's talented, and a bunch of liberals making fat jokes ain't going to blunt that. It's time for people to take this guy seriously.

I do. Could he beat Hillary Clinton? Probably not, but I bet he could beat Andrew Cuomo or Martin O'Malley. And I really hope that doesn't happen. I hope he doesn't dish out the centrist schmaltz just long enough to win a general election, then give us four wingnut years.

ON RICE, THE GOP PLAYS THE MAUREEN DOWD CARD

From today's New York Times, we learn that Republicans have another excuse for rejecting Susan Rice even before she's nominated to be secretary of state: she has to be rejected because the president isn't courteous enough:

Some Republicans said the White House had left her to fend for herself.

"They floated her name to test the waters; they found out that the waters are pretty rough, and then they didn't give her a life preserver," said Senator John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming on the Foreign Relations Committee....

Republicans said the White House's approach fits a pattern of not reaching out to Congress, whether on budget negotiations or to defend other appointments.

Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said the White House had not contacted her about Ms. Rice. After meeting with her last week, Ms. Collins expressed reservations about her suitability for secretary of state.

I believe that faint sound you hear is Maureen Dowd typing furiously, generating her 8732nd column about how President Spock is just too haughty and aloof for this job, whereas Tip and the Gipper used to get together for drinks on a regular basis and that was the golden age of American politics.

Ahhh, but wait for it:

Ms. Collins said she did not believe outreach would have mitigated the issues that arose in their meeting, but she added that the White House generally had not engaged with Congressional Republicans in any meaningful way since the departure of Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s former chief of staff.

So, um ... all that outreach Obama is supposed to do? It wouldn't even work, according to Amigo 3-A.*

You know, I'm wondering how much good all that 1980s socializing would have done if Ronald Reagan had routinely threatened to punch Tip O'Neill's lights out after a few drinks. I don't think it would have be particularly helpful.

*I'm classifying Kelly Ayotte as 3-B, based on seniority.

APPARENTLY, ACCORDING TO CHENEY, WE SHOULD HAVE KEPT FIGHTING IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN PRETTY MUCH FOREVER

Fox Nation has posted a clip of Dick Cheney's speech last night at the Hudson Institute, under the rather sociopathic -- and thus quintessentially Ailesian -- headline "Cheney Takes Flamethrower to Obama." Like all Fox News videos, it has an embed code that doesn't work (excellent mastery of the Internet, Mr. Murdoch -- oh, and a damn shame about your now-defuct Daily), but you can watch the clip at the link above, or here, where it's posted under a headline that's, um, even more psychologically revealing: "Cheney Unloads on Obama During Hudson Institute Speech."

In the speech, Cheney says this about the Middle East:

That entire part of the world appears to be, or a good part of it certainly, to be moving in a direction that's fundamentally hostile to long-term U.S. interests. And yet we are -- seem to be unable to influence events in that part of the world, partly because we're headed for the exits, and everybody knows we're headed for the exits.

We pulled out of Iraq -- we didn't even bother to negotiate the stay-behind agreement that was traditional in those kind of relationships. We're well on our way out of Afghanistan. And we have had a president who's been to Cairo; one of the first things he did, to apologize for the U.S. reaction to 9/11, alleged that we had, quote, “overreacted" and fallen away from our basic traditional values.

So I guess we should have prevented the Arab Spring by ceaselessly trying to dig ourselves out of the Iraq and Afghanistan holes Cheney and Bush dug for us with their botched wars. And I guess we were supposed to pay for those endless wars with Bush's tax cuts.

Oh, and the word "overreacted" doesn't appear once in Obama's Cairo speech. It does, however, appear in a Politico story about Obama's Cairo speech, which Cheney has quoted ever since as if he's quoting Obama. From the Politico story:

In comments that will also be portrayed as an apology, Obama told the Cairo audience that the U.S. overreacted to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals," he said. "I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year."

So denouncing torture and Gitmo as "contrary to our ideals" still gets up Cheney's nose. Well, naturally.

Oh, and here's that quote in context:

And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter or forget our principles. Nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year. (Applause.)

So America will defend itself, respectful of the sovereignty of nations and the rule of law. And we will do so in partnership with Muslim communities which are also threatened. The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer.

So Obama said that in the context of talking about continuing to fight. Still not enough for Cheney. But why would Cheney familiarize himself with the actual text of Obama's Cairo speech when the right-wing caricature so obvious warms the cockles of his mechanical heart?

MORE RIGHT-WING WHINING ABOUT HOW UNFAIR THE FISCAL BATTLE IS FOR THE POOR, SUFFERING GOP

In my last post, I told you that Peggy Noonan thinks our current fiscal battle is so unfair to Republicans, who are constitutionally banned from making an appealing case to the public (or something like that). Now we find John Podhoretz also arguing that we should shed a tear for Republicans, who have the deck stacked against them, largely through circumstances they couldn't possibly have controlled:

Now, as the Right tries to pick itself up and dust itself off and start all over again, it finds itself in the heat of a battle for which it is learning it is rhetorically and emotionally unprepared.

The "fiscal cliff" coming on Dec. 31 will automatically cause everyone's taxes to rise and draconian defense cuts to go into effect. That leaves Republicans and conservatives having to fight a very public battle on these matters only weeks after a national defeat.

And they've somehow been maneuvered into arguing that benefits must be cut and taxes on the wealthy must not be raised -- without having a single populist argument in their favor.

Yes -- Republicans and conservatives were "unprepared" to do battle over the sequester -- which was signed into law sixteen months ago! Who remembers this stuff? You enter in your calendar and then you get that little electronic reminder, and you forget all about it! Doesn't that happen to everyone?

And they're having to deal with this immediately after an election! Not fair! It's not as if President Obama and the Democrats just went through an election -- oh, wait....

And they've been maneuvered -- somehow! -- into saying benefits should be cut and taxes on the wealthy not raised! What scoundrels did this to them?

They lack "a single populist argument," and Podhoretz sighs:

Thus, the political movement that came to maturity by advocating for dynamic American optimism has morphed into what it was at its most pinched and parched in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s: the eat-your-vegetables-and-shut-up party.

Is that the GOP's problem? Not exactly. In recent years, the GOP hasn't been "the eat-your-vegetables-and-shut-up party." It's been the party that always wanted, um, certain people to eat their vegetables and shut up. You know who I mean. Immigrants. "Union thugs." Single women who have sex. People who aren't country music lovers and NRA members. People with particular melanin levels. Those people.

But this year -- especially after Mitt Romney mouthed off about the "47%" -- we learned that there seem to be more of those people than there are the GOP's people, and many of the people the Republicans thought were theirs felt that all this Republican talk about "takers" who aren't "makers" was aimed at them.

So it's not that the GOP doesn't have a populist argument -- it's that the GOP's populist argument was a divide-and-conquer argument. And now too many people feel they're not on the GOP's side of the divide.

IT'S ALL SO UNFAIR!

If I'm reading Peggy Noonan correctly here, President Obama is winning the rhetorical war with Republicans on the fiscal crisis because the whole system is completely and utterly stacked in his favor:

The Republican negotiators, to the extent they are allowed to negotiate, are at a disadvantage in terms of explaining what's at issue. There are a dozen of them, they're lawmakers, they speak the language of legislation, and when they make statements at press gaggles they're not talking to the American people but, inevitably, to the president, his staff and the larger political class. So the higher meaning of things, on the Republican side, seems to have gotten a little lost. In fact at the moment they look like a party that is both obsessed with a thing -- tax rates -- and unable to explain why it's important.

The president operates under a different dynamic. There's just one of him, he's the chief executive, and he was just re-elected. He's talking not to the Republicans -- that's what Treasury secretaries are for -- but to the American people.

Wait -- what? The Republicans have mastered message discipline over the past couple of decades, they control the most-watched cable news channel in America as well as AM talk radio, they have the best-funded think tanks, they dominate the Sunday morning talk shows, and their advocacy of fiscal pain for the non-rich finds wide agreement among self-styled Beltway mainstreamers -- and yet they're the ones who are laboring under a structural handicap in this debate? It's Obama who has it easy?

If Republicans aren't talking directly to the American people, what's stopping them? Lack of an appropriate figurehead? Seriously? When they have all these Amigos, all these Young Guns, all these Great 2016 Hopes?

And hasn't Noonan told us repeatedly that Obama is actually a lousy communicator and the American people don't really like him? Here's Noonan just after this year's Democratic convention:

Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic....

It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.

Here's Noonan's capsule history of Obama's first term, written days before the election:

Because he had so much confidence, he thought whatever he did would work. He thought he had "a gift," as he is said to have told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He thought he had a special ability to sway the American people, or so he suggested to House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

But whenever he went over the the heads of the media and Congress and went to the people, in prime-time addresses, it didn't really work. He did not have a magical ability to sway. And -- oddly -- he didn't seem to notice.

It is one thing to think you're Lebron. It's another thing to keep missing the basket and losing games and still think you're Lebron.

And that really was the problem: He had the confidence without the full capability.

So Obama's weakness, according to Noonan in that column, is that he thinks he can go over the Beltway's head and win fights by talking directly to the American public -- but he can't, because he sucks at that. And Obama's strength? Well, as Noonan says today, it's that he can go over the Beltway's head and win fights by talking directly to the American public -- which is his unfair advantage!

Right. Got it. Thanks, Peggy.

DON'T FORGET WHAT YOUR GOOD BOOK SAID

Please tell me this won't happen:

... last month ... Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.) filed a resolution to name an historic federal building in Raleigh after Helms. H.R. 6607 would rename the Century Post Office the "Jesse Helms Federal Building and United States Courthouse."

Well, that's a meeting of the minds across generations: one of the ads Ellmers ran in her 2010 House race demagogued the "Ground Zero mosque" issue (yes, her North Carolina House race), and last year she was calling for an investigation of "systemic fraud and abuse" at ... wait for it ... Planned Parenthood. Ol' Jess would be proud.

The story comes from Mary C. Curtis of The Washington Post, who reminds us of some of Helms's greatest hits:

Helms called the 1964 Civil Rights bill "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress." He suggested a wall around the University of North Carolina, which he called the "University of Negroes and Communists," to protect the rest of the state from liberal infection.

Helms supporters may prefer him judged by a late-in-life partnership with rock star Bono over the AIDS fight rather than his 1990's efforts to reduce federal money spent on AIDS because, he said in The New York Times, AIDS sufferers' "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct" was responsible for their illness.

...in the [1980s] Helms fiercely denounced ... the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., for what Helms called "action-oriented Marxism" when he opposed a federal holiday to honor the slain civil rights leader. Helms said King used "nonviolence as a provocative act to disturb the peace of the state and to trigger, in many cases, overreaction by authorities" ...

And there's this, of course:





There does seem to be some resistance to naming things after Helms -- except in certain circles:

[This] would be the first federal building anywhere named for Helms, the state’s powerful and longtime senator, said John Dodd, president of the Helms Center in Wingate....

Also named for Helms is the Helms School of Government at Liberty University in Virginia, the Christian university founded by the late founder of the Moral Majority lobbying group, Jerry Falwell.

Earlier this year a move to the name Wake County criminal justice center after Helms was met with resistance.

There’s nothing else in North Carolina named after Helms, except a short stretch of a highway between Monroe and Wingate and a county park and nursing home in Union County, Dodd said.

That's more than enough.

FEVER BREAKING? I DON'T THINK SO

Yes, Jim DeMint is leaving the Senate to head the Heritage Foundation. That gets a high-profile crazy out of the upper chamber. However, Governor Nikki Haley gets to pick his replacement, who'll stay on for two years -- the next election for the seat will be in 2014 -- and the apparent favorite for the job, the guy DeMint himself prefers, is Congressman Tim Scott. Scott, as Amanda Terkel reminds us, suggested impeaching President Obama in 2011 if he tried to use the 14th Amendment to circumvent the debt ceiling:

While some have asserted that the debt limit might be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, and therefore President Obama does not need congressional approval to raise it, Republicans have been quick to express skepticism over the idea. On Tuesday, a Republican congressman went a step further, saying that if Obama were to use that argument to bypass Congress on the issue, it would be an impeachable offense.

"This president is looking to usurp congressional oversight to find a way to get it done without us. My position is that is an impeachable act from my perspective," said Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) at a meeting sponsored by the Tea Party group LowCountry 9.12 Project....

Scott has also said that "the greatest minority under assault today are Christians. No doubt about it." I don't believe Scott is even an inch to DeMint's left.

****

Meanwhile, The New York Times is reporting that once-restive House Republicans are now solidly behind John Boehner. Fever broken there, at least? BooMan is skeptical:

I am not sure that I am sharing the same universe with Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times. She says that Speaker Boehner has never enjoyed stronger or more unified support from his caucus than he has now. How can that be? ...

The backbenchers may be keeping their criticisms quiet, but that doesn't mean that are about to line up to vote for a tax increase on the top 2% of earners that is accompanied by few benefit cuts for Medicare and none for Social Security. Furthermore, the president is insisting that the debt ceiling be removed as a weapon. Perhaps the Republican Establishment wouldn't mind having that gun put back in a locked case, but I'd like to see John Boehner sell that to his Tea Party caucus....

The House Republicans aren't becoming significantly more reasonable -- at best, they may be willing to accept some tax increases on the rich so they can engage in irresponsible brinkmanship over the debt ceiling in a couple of months without middle-class tax cuts hanging over their heads and giving the president leverage. Their fever may have gone down a degree, but it hasn't broken.

****

And then there's Bobby Jindal, one of the GOP's Great 2016 Hopes. A month ago, he was quoted denouncing "dumbed-down conservatism" in an interview with Politico's Jonathan Martin. So what's he up to now? Dave Weigel explains:

One month later, Jindal returns to Politico with an op-ed about the sort of Republican ideas for reform "which would be worth fighting for in this fiscal cliff diving exercise." They are: a balanced budget amendment ..., a cap on spending to 18 percent of GDP, a 2/3 majority for any tax increase, and term limits. As much of this as possible should be linked to a debt limit hike that's "one-time, limited, and accompanied by structural reform."

These are not new ideas. They're dumbed-down ideas. The first three proposals were all part of Cut, Cap, and Balance, the first and most important conservative-led Republican ransom note on the debt limit.

... What's Jindal suggesting to Republicans? Because the president's first offer on the "fiscal cliff" was largely progressive, Republicans should respond with a microwaved version of their 2011 offer?

These aren't just dumb, warmed-over ideas -- they're dangerous ideas. The point of a balanced budget amendment and supermajority requirements for tax increases is to make Keynesian illegal, or as close to illegal as possible. Had these measures been in effect during the financial crisis, they would have effectively prevented Presidents Bush and Obama from putting a floor under the economic collapse. We would have seen a full-blown depression. That's deep thinking from a guy who thinks he's the future of the GOP. That's not a sign of a broken fever.

IRONY DIES AGAIN

Among the "Merry Taxmas" e-cards you can send to legislators, courtesy of Americans for Prosperity, is this one:




Oh, yes: let's cut Medicare for ordinary Americans so we can save the plutocrats' tax breaks ... in the spirit of It's a Wonderful Life! Brilliant!

(And attention copyright lawyers: In addition to this, AFP also has e-cards that use images and taglines from Home Alone and A Christmas Story. So start suing!)

PRETTY MUCH ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CHUCK TODD

He thinks this is so profound it merits a retweet:





What Simpson means, I assume, is: "Young people need to get involved so they can help us tip the balance in favor of screwing over their aging parents and grandparents." Does it surprise you that Chuck thinks that's profound?

I assume Chuck also responds to this trite quip because Simpson seems to be recommending sincere, snark-free civic engagement to The Kidz. Todd thinks The Kidz are too damn cynical -- recall that he once questioned whether Stephen Colbert's fake presidential candidacy was "fair to the process," in a public appearance in which he also said -- in so many words -- that the House and Senate are institutions he idolizes. Respect your betters, you young whippersnappers!

K.T. McFARLAND WAS ONLY JOKING? WE SEEM TO HEAR THAT A LOT ABOUT HER

Earlier this week, Bob Woodward reported that in 2011 Roger Ailes urged David Petraeus to run for president; the suggestion was relayed via Kathleen "K.T." McFarland, a Fox News national security correspondent. Now McFarland has taken to her Fox blog to say she was only joking:

My comment was prompted by a conversation I had had with Roger before leaving for Afghanistan. We discussed many topics, most involving national security. On my way out, I casually told him, I'll give the general your regards, shall I? Roger smiled and replied something to the effect of, tell him if they don't make him chairman of the joint chiefs, he ought to jump into the presidential race to stir things up. I know now that Roger was joking, but at the time, I wasn't sure....

Petraeus and I were having fun. Having just told me definitively that he wouldn't run, he suggested that maybe Ailes could run this non-existent campaign. It was not a serious conversation plotting General Petraeus' political future; it was the kind of idle speculation that happens in every campaign season. That's why they call it the silly season. I knew he was serious about not wanting to run, and he knew I wasn't serious in pressing it.

Curiously, this isn't the first time McFarland has made the news for saying something we were later told was a joke. Back in 2006, she was pursuing the GOP Senate nomination in New York State, wanting to run against Hillary Clinton. Then the New York Post reported this:

A Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bizarrely claiming that the former first lady has been spying in her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons, witnesses told The Post yesterday.

Former Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen "KT" McFarland stunned a crowd of Suffolk County Republicans on Thursday by saying:

"Hillary Clinton is really worried about me, and is so worried, in fact, that she had helicopters flying over my house in Southampton today taking pictures," according to a prominent GOP activist who was at the event....

McFarland spokesman William O'Reilly responded that the GOP hopeful was just kidding around with her far-fetched claims.

"It was a joke, and people laughed," O'Reilly insisted.

But three witnesses who were present said nobody in the audience cracked a smile.

"The whole room sort of went silent when she said it," one person said....

McFarland has a rather checkered past -- she's engaged in resume padding, she became estranged from her gay brother as he was dying of AIDS in the 1990s (and wouldn't let her children visit him), and, well, there's quite a bit more where that came from. So, no, I don't buy her version of the Ailes story.

JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY, INGRAHAM STYLE

Media Matters catches Laura Ingraham in a bit of hypocrisy:

The December 5 edition of conservative pundit Laura Ingraham's newsletter attacked President Obama for recently meeting with MSNBC personalities, claiming that "if Fox News hosts and conservative personalities had stopped by the Bush White House to discuss policy" the press "would have been rightly outraged." But President Bush did meet with a group of Fox News and conservative personalities at the White House -- including Laura Ingraham....

The New York Times reported in October 2006 that Bush hosted a group of conservative personalities including Fox News contributor and frequent guest host Ingraham....

The Times article featured [a] White House photo of the meeting, showing Ingraham sitting next to Bush....

I'll just add this: Ingraham also emceed a Bush campaign rally in St. Paul, Minnesota, on August 18, 2004. From Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters:

... When my fellow members of the Northern Alliance received an invitation to attend today's George Bush rally, the opportunity was too good to pass up. And I'm glad I didn't....

The Republicans presented a number of speakers, emceed by the ever-acerbic Laura Ingraham, who was in fine form tonight....

From Bush's speech at that rally:

I appreciate Laura Ingraham for being the emcee of this fine event. (Applause.)

Tell us more about journalistic integrity, Laura.

IS THERE NO LIMIT TO HOLLYWOOD'S PREJUDICE AGAINST PARANOID RACIST CONSPIRATORIALISM?

Help, help! Gerald Molen and Dinesh D'Souza are being repressed!

'2016' Oscar Snub Has Filmmakers Claiming Political Bias

Gerald Molen ... is claiming political bias because a documentary movie he produced this year isn't up for an Oscar, even though that film, 2016: Obama's America, made more money at the box office than the combined earning of the 15 films the Academy deemed eligible.

2016, a negative take on President Barack Obama co-written and directed by author Dinesh D'Souza, earned $33.4 million at the domestic box office. But its omission on the list of the 15 documentaries the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Monday would advance in the voting process makes it ineligible for an Oscar.

"Dinesh warned me this might happen," Molen said with a laugh Tuesday....

"I want to thank the Academy for not nominating our film," D'Souza joked. "By ignoring 2016, the top-performing box-office hit of 2012, and pretending that films like Searching for Sugar Man and This Is Not a Film are more deserving of an Oscar, our friends in Hollywood have removed any doubt average Americans may have had that liberal political ideology, not excellence, is the true standard of what receives awards." ...

Really, Dinesh? Hollywood is showing liberal bias by snubbing your movie in favor of This Is Not a Film? Do you even know the first thing about This Is Not a Film?

Here, let me tell you about that movie:

The internationally acclaimed director Jafar Panahi, a supporter of the 2009 election protests in Iran, was arrested in 2010 for "certain offenses" against the Islamic Republic. He was sentenced to a six-year prison term and a 20-year ban on filmmaking, and has since been awaiting the verdict of his appeal under house arrest in Tehran. During this time, he collaborated with documentarian Mojtaba Mir Tahmaseb to film a day of this experience (on a digital camera and, at some points, an iPhone). The result, This Is Not a Film, was smuggled into Cannes on a USB drive hidden inside a cake and Panahi has been unable to leave Iran to attend its various festival showings. Panahi attempts to stay in front of the camera in order not to disobey his sentence, while Mir Tahmaseb "directs" this underground project -- a dangerous undertaking, for he was arrested on September 17th for allegedly spying for BBC Persia. This film, a work of great courage, humor, and self-reflection, is an example of how art in Iran flourishes despite the nation's ever-restricted circumstances.

Ahhh, but I'm sure Panahi's courage pales next to the courage you showed, Dinesh, in hoovering up money from Joe Ricketts and other right-wing billionaires so you could film yourself hula dancing in Hawaii in 2016 -- y'know, for atmosphere. Right?

TINA BROWN ENABLES SANTORUM'S NEO-BIRTHERISM

The extremism of the Republican Party is beginning to recognized by the general public -- on tax rates for the rich, on reproductive issues, on immigration, on whether people who need public assistance are worthy of simple respect as Americans and human beings. In the midst of this, yesterday Senate Republicans voted to reject a UN treaty on the rights of the disabled, effectively spitting in the face of 89-year-old Bob Dole, the wheelchair-bound former senator and Republican presidential nominee, who was on the floor of the Senate trying to urge support for the treaty.

If you're a media insider, what do you when it becomes clear that one of the nation's two major political parties has gone completely crazy? Well, if you're Tina Brown of the Daily Beast, what you do is enable the insanity by trying to normalize it -- you publish an op-ed by the best-known crackpot anti-UN conspiratorialist, Rick Santorum. You put your imprimatur on the notion that the treaty would have allowed jackbooted UN thugs to tell parents how to raise their disabled kids, thus suggesting that maybe the notion isn't so crazy after all, if Newsweek/The Daily Beast will give it a serious airing.

I won't dignify the content of the op-ed by analyzing it. I will point out that it takes Santorum all of four sentences before he's using his disabled daughter, Bella, as a political prop:

The reason I have so strongly opposed CRPD is also simple. Karen and I have experienced first-hand as we care for our little blessing, Bella, that parents and caregivers care most deeply and are best equipped to care for the disabled. Not international bureaucrats.

Santorum, as you may know, incessantly uses Bella to try to score political points. It's shameless.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at the mainstreaming of right-wing anti-UN paranoia -- as Kevin Drum notes, this kind of thinking goes back decades in the GOP, and as Steve Clemons noted last night on Rachel Maddow's show, this kind of thinking really began to flower a generation ago when Jesse Helms was at the height of his power. (The good old days! The days when the Gipper and Tip used to hash things out over drinks!) Oh, and that nice, mainstream Dick Morris has a big bestseller that tells us UN conspiracy theories aren't nutty after all. So I guess we're just going to decide that it's perfectly OK for the GOP to be made up of nothing but Jesse Helms-style nutjobs.

YES, REPUBLICAN VOTERS THINK ACORN STILL EXISTS -- BECAUSE FOX KEEPS SAYING SO

Perhaps you've seen this, from Public Policy Polling:

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.

Jamelle Bouie is skeptical:

Kevin Drum calls this evidence of the "Fox News effect" -- the process by which conservative propaganda outlets convince their viewers of things that just aren't true -- but I think there's a better, more charitable explanation. In short, a large number of Republicans don't like President Obama, and when offered a chance to endorse something that signals that dislike, they did it, even if the "something" is absolutely insane.

But why would Republicans, and Fox News viewers in particular, regard the possibility of ACORN voter fraud in 2012 as "absolutely insane"? Because ACORN doesn't exist anymore? Please note that Fox News keeps telling its viewers that ACORN still does exist -- at least in altered form.

* FoxNews.com, October 26, 2011: "EXCLUSIVE: ACORN Playing Behind Scenes Role in 'Occupy' Movement"

... The former director of New York ACORN, Jon Kest, and his top aides are now busy working at protest events for New York Communities for Change (NYCC)....

* FoxNews.com, February 13, 2012: "ACORN-linked group raising funds for California 'Occupy' protest"

A re-branded ACORN branch in California is raising money to help fund an upcoming "Occupy" protest in Sacramento, FoxNews.com has learned.

The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment sent out letters this month pleading for contributions of up to $20,000....

* Fox Nation, June 7, 2012: "WATCHDOG: Former ACORN Director Gets $445M from Taxpayers"

The Obama Administration has given a former director at the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) nearly half a billion dollars to offer "struggling" Illinois homeowners mortgage assistance, a Judicial Watch investigation has found....

* FoxNews.com, July 19, 2012: "Taxpayer watchdog calls on IRS to probe re-branded Texas ACORN branch"

The former Texas ACORN chapter has a new name and a scheme to collect donations and divert them for political use in a way that abuses tax laws governing charitable organizations, according to a Washington-based public interest group....

* Fox Nation, August 28, 2012: "Report: 170 ACORN-Affiliated Groups Still Active"

Many of ACORN's affiliates, allies, and old chapters remain active under different names -- and at least two have received federal dollars --despite the left-wing community-organizing group's official dissolution and ban on receiving federal funds, according to a new report....

And my favorite:

* Fox Nation, five days ago: "ACORN Messing With Your Big Mac"

The New York Times reports that union organizers are trying to convince fast food workers to unionize.

The effort is being led by New York Communities for Change which is the name of the reorganized and rebranded former ACORN office in Brooklyn....

As it turns out, every person who ever worked for ACORN hasn't been summarily executed or sent to a gulag for life -- because, presumably, the vast majority of them haven't done anything illegal or immoral. Thus, Fox and the rest of the wingnut press are determined to expose every single ex-ACORNer and make the case that massive subversion of the American way of life is still taking place, and it's still ACORN's fault.

So, yeah, Republicans do still literally believe this.

APPARENTLY IT'S NOW UNPRESIDENTIAL TO HOST THE KENNEDY CENTER HONOREES

Right-wingers spends their entire waking lives looking for things to be outraged about, the way certain large whales never stop searching for food. The latest outrage? According to Bryan Preston of Pajamas Media, it's unseemly for President Obama, at this time, to be inviting the Kennedy Center honorees to the White House -- something presidents do every year.

Preston cites this story from England's Telegraph, which quotes a few jokes the president made at the expense of Led Zeppelin, who were honored this year. Preston whines:

Great band, great songs, but it's not like a ceremony to hand them a medal could not have waited until the fiscal cliff talks were done and a deal had been hammered out. Obama has literally put being a celebrity and hanging out with celebrities ahead of doing his job. If we go over the fiscal cliff, millions of Americans will suffer. Obama knows this; he just doesn't care.

Um, let me take you back to December 2, 2001. This was 52 days after 9/11 -- but that didn't stop President Bush from inviting that year's Kennedy Center honorees to the White House:

President Bush hosted a Hollywood who's-who on Sunday as actors Jack Nicholson and Julie Andrews, pianist Van Cliburn, composer-producer Quincy Jones and tenor Luciano Pavarotti were saluted for their contributions to the performing arts at the Kennedy Center Honors.

The president paid tribute to the honorees and, in keeping with his custom, teased them....

"This year's honorees can carry a tune. And then there's Jack."

... those attending a White House reception before the honors gala Sunday included Warren Beatty and his wife, Annette Bening; Candice Bergen, Bo Derek, Carol Burnett, Michael Douglas, Lorne Michaels, Lynn Redgrave-Clarke and Oprah Winfrey....

Even the mayor of West Hollywood was there. "BUSH HOSTS GLITTERATI AT KENNEDY AWARDS" was how the San Jose Mercury News put it.

A few days after that, Osama bin Laden escaped to safety after the Battle of Tora Bora.

Ahhh, but it's OK to hobnob with celebs at any time if you're a Republican.

NOBODY BELIEVES YOU WERE JOKING, ROGER

Bob Woodward has learned that Roger Ailes tried to lure David Petraeus into the 2012 presidential race. Woodward has the offer on tape, so Ailes can't deny it, but Ailes is claiming it was a joke:

... in spring 2011, Ailes asked a Fox News analyst headed to Afghanistan to pass on his thoughts to Petraeus.... Petraeus, Ailes advised, should turn down an expected offer from President Obama to become CIA director and accept nothing less than the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military post. If Obama did not offer the Joint Chiefs post, Petraeus should resign from the military and run for president, Ailes suggested.

The Fox News chairman’s message was delivered to Petraeus by Kathleen T. McFarland, a Fox News national security analyst....

McFarland also said that Ailes ... might resign as head of Fox to run a Petraeus presidential campaign. At one point, McFarland and Petraeus spoke about the possibility that Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp., which owns Fox News, would "bankroll" the campaign....

In a telephone interview Monday, the wily and sharp-tongued Ailes said he did indeed ask McFarland to make the pitch to Petraeus. "It was more of a joke, a wiseass way I have," he said. "I thought the Republican field [in the primaries] needed to be shaken up and Petraeus might be a good candidate."

Ailes added, ". . . It's someone's fantasy to make me a kingmaker. It's not my job."

But we know that Ailes thinks it is his job. Gabriel Sherman wrote about this in May 2011, specifically noting Ailes's interest in Petraeus, although not the recruitment. Sherman's point, however, was that Ailes was using Fox to shape the presidential field (though he knew even then that that wasn't working out very well):

Ailes is..., in a sense, the head of the Republican Party, having employed five prospective presidential candidates....

So it must have been disturbing to Ailes when the wheels started to come off Fox's presidential-circus caravan.... with an actual presidential election on the horizon, the Fox candidates' poll numbers remain dismally low (Sarah Palin is polling 12 percent; Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, 10 percent and 2 percent, respectively).... A few months ago, Ailes called Chris Christie and encouraged him to jump into the race.... Ailes had also hoped that David Petraeus would run for president, but Petraeus too has decided to sit this election out....

"You can't run for the Republican nomination without talking to Roger," one GOPer told me. "Every single candidate has consulted with Roger."

And we know that after Christie toured New Jersey with President Obama in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, he tried to mend fences with the GOP by calling Godfather Rupert Murdoch.

Fox runs the GOP as much as anyone does. Every candidate this year except Huntsman and Paul set out to run a Fox campaign (and you see the result). This will be true for the foreseeable future.

NEW WINGNUT COMPLAINT: THE OBAMAS ARE BEING TOO CHRISTIAN AT CHRISTMASTIME

The Obamas can't win. Via Matt Drudge, I see that Andrew Malcolm of Investor's Business Daily is complaining that the First Family is overdoing the celebration of Jesus' birth. Can't they tone it down a little bit?

As Americans face a fiscal cliff, the Obamas make do with 54 Christmas trees

Amazing how a reelection can reshape an incumbent's thinking about many things. Now safely ensconced in the White House for 49 more months, the Obamas have decorated the place with 54 Christmas trees this year.

Even allowing for the usual Washington excesses with taxpayer money, that's a whole grove of Christmas trees.

"We have 54 trees in the White House," an excited Michelle Obama proudly told visitors the other day. "54! That's a lot of trees."

In fact, the Obamas' 54 trees this year are almost 50% more Christmas trees than last year....

Not only does wingnut Malcolm think the Obamas are being too Christian, he thinks they're not being green enough:

Now, how much carbon do you suppose those 54 trees could be sequestering had they not been chopped by this green president?

And it just gets worse and worse:

In addition to 54 Christmas trees, Michelle Obama has overseen the placement of thousands of ornaments in public rooms. Many of the ornaments celebrate the Obama family dog, Bo, who seems to have become the First Family's favorite symbol of Christmas. Other decorations, including on the more prominent trees, were made by children in schools on U.S. military bases.

Yes, it's actually come to this: right-wingers are apparently against the children of the troops. And dogs. No word yet on Mom and apple pie, but I'm sure if Barack and Michelle express their support for those two...

****

UPDATE: I see that this is recycled fauxtrage for Malcolm. (Hat tip: elftx in Balloon Juice comments, and Bob Cesca.)

A MASTER CLASS IN HORRIBLE COURTIER JOURNALISM

If you'd like to persuade a skeptic that political insider journalism must be destroyed and all its practitioners lined against a wall and summarily executed, all the evidence you need is contained in an article by McKay Coppins that was just posted on BuzzFeed: "How Bobby Jindal Got His Mojo Back In 2012."

Start with the premise contained in the title: up to now, have you seen any evidence that Bobby Jindal actually has mojo? Even if you thought he once had some, do you believe he's gotten it back?

Now move on to the photo accompanying the article. Does this photo say "presidential mojo" to you?





Yes, that's Jindal with Rick Perry -- by common consent the worst presidential candidate of 2012, and one of the worst ever.

And the photo matches the article's content. You see, according to Coppins, associating with Perry has done excellent things for Jindal:

The last year has been a bad one for many Republicans, but 2012 was exceptionally kind to Bobby Jindal.

The 41-year-old Louisiana governor ends the presidential campaign cycle as a staple on the Sunday talk shows, a regular subject of 2016 speculation, and a legitimate contender to become the next standard-bearer of a party that once again finds itself leaderless.

And the former Rhodes Scholar has Rick Perry to thank for it all.

Do tell.

Jindal endorsed Perry early on in the GOP primaries, at a time when Republicans were stampeding toward the Texas governor, convinced that he would be the nominee. But if Jindal's initial endorsement was unsurprising, his unwavering fealty -- expressed to the bitter end -- impressed many in Perry's camp.

"Anything we asked of him, he was there," said one former Perry campaign official. "When the tide was high and when the tide was low, he was a loyal soldier."

And that's a good thing, according to Coppins. A stint as Rick Perry's wingman makes it likely that ordinary citizens in Iowa and New Hampshire and Super Tuesday states will vote for Jindal. Naturally! In fact, when general election voters in key swing states are asked what qualities they're most looking for in a 2016 candidate, "being Rick Perry's wingman" is at or near the top of the list!

Left out of the "BFF" narrative is the extent to which Perry's campaign introduced Jindal to key voter blocs in early primary states, fine-tuned his skills on the stump, and propelled him back into the national spotlight.

Coppins is serious: Jindal now has mad skillz because he was schooled in politics by Rick Perry's campaign team.

Though Jindal failed to get his buddy elected president, his efforts left him exceptionally well-positioned for his own run.

Judy Davidson, chairwoman of the Scott County Republicans, was present at one of Jindal's first campaign stops with Perry in Iowa last year. His stump speech, she recalled, checked all the boxes of an effective surrogate -- touting Perry's credentials, confidently predicting victory -- but it also managed to weave in the story of Jindal's own greatest executive triumph: his handling of Hurricane Gustav.

In late August 2008, the devastation of Katrina was still an open wound in Louisiana when the state found itself bracing for another potentially disastrous mega-storm. As Gustav barreled toward the coastline, the newly elected governor moved fast, evacuating two million people, securing generators for the hospitals in harm's way, and aggressively mobilizing the National Guard. When the post-Gustav casualty count came in much lower than many had feared, Jindal was heralded across the country as a hurricane-fighting super-governor.

I'm sure you all remember Jindal being called "a hurricane-fighting super-governor." I'm sure you all remember Hurricane Gustav, that terrifying storm with a "casualty count came in much lower than many had feared." What? No? You don't? None of you? You mean this isn't seared into America's collective national memory?

...Meanwhile, among Perry's top aides, there was no denying the utility of Jindal's support -- largely as a shield against the early campaign meme that Perry was a dull-witted George W. Bush redux.

Yeah, right -- if it weren't for Jindal, most of America would think of Rick Perry as a drooling Texas dimwit!

Jindal's momentum wasn't slowed when it turned out he had backed a losing horse. His transition to Romney surrogate was frictionless....

Yeah, that worked out much better!

In September, ... Jindal joined a weeklong bus tour sponsored by a social conservative group called the Family Leader to campaign against an Iowa justice who voted to legalize same-sex marriage in the state.

The campaign failed to unseat the judge, giving Jindal an unblemished record of failure for the year.

Look, I get it: Jindal has punched his ticket with GOP insiders, and he has spin doctors of his own, so he's making his move, of which this article is a part. But there's no evidence whatsoever that Jindal has any credibility with actual voters. Maybe he'll be the Morning Joe green room choice for 2016. But how meaningful is that?

This is a Jindal press release written by someone who thinks he's engaged in actual journalism. Take the blinkers off, McKay. You need a little perspective.

WILL THE RIGHT USE THE OLD BRAND FOR THE NEW TANTRUM?

On Meet the Press yesterday, Grover Norquist made a prediction:

"We are about to have a Tea Party second wave that will dwarf the first wave and that is because while 'spend too much' brought the Tea Party into existence, we're about to walk into 'spend too much, regulate too much, and tax too much,' all together. It's going to be a perfect storm of annoying government behavior, which is devastating to the economy, and I think the small business community which is particularly hit by Obama's tax increases are going to lead the fight bigger, stronger, tougher than the last Tea Party."

The original tea party wave would have amounted to nothing if deep-pocketed billionaire Astroturfers hadn't bought the movement a place at the table, deploying cash, organizational aid, and huge amounts of media publicity, particularly on Fox. Whatever the tea party movement may have been in its very early days, the movement is a product of Right-Wing Billionaire World. And, yes, those folks didn't do very well when it came to trying to elect a president this year. They were wise, I think, to mothball the radical, frequently crazy and racist tea party agitation, but teabag-friendly ideas were albatrosses around the GOP's neck.

But they know they succeeded in the 2010 midterms. And since the right doesn't care about governing, or taking responsibility for the proper stewardship of America, they're already fixated on 2014 and wondering if the Obama turnout machine might falter again in an election without Obama on the ballot. So would they try to revive the tea party brand? Is that their plan -- to replicate 2009 and 2010 in the next two years, in the hope that the 2014 midterms will be dominated by the conservative old white people Gallup and Rasmussen see as extremely likely voters?

It's clear that congressional Republicans are going to try to prevent Obama from governing from the inside, which is what they did in Obama's first term, and is what the teabaggers tried to do to Obama and the Democrats from the outside in 2009 and 2010. Paul Krugman writes:

Oh, boy. This isn't going to end, even when or if a deal is reached on defusing the austerity bomb; John Boehner has just declared that he's going to hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage every time we hit the debt limit.

... if the next two years are, as they seem likely to be, one long Republican tantrum, the 2014 election is not going to be a normal midterm. It will instead be a referendum on GOP obstructionism, which may attract a lot more attention -- and much higher turnout -- than normal.

I think Republicans are hoping for exactly the opposite, at least on the left and center: they want liberal and moderate voters to be demoralized again in 2014, while right-wingers are fired up. Would they use the tea party again to get there? And will Democrats learn from what worked this year and didn't work two years ago?

THE OBAMA-IZATION OF HILLARY CLINTON BEGINS

After Hillary Clinton gave a speech this weekend at the Saban Forum, The New Yorker's David Remnick wrote naively:

She proceeded to give a serious, sturdy speech of a certain kind; if not quite AIPAC-ready, it was a speech extremely careful not to ruffle anyone's delicate feelings or becloud her last days as secretary of state. She asked of Israel only that it show more "generosity" to the Palestinians.

You think that won't ruffle anyone's delicate feathers, David? Let me introduce you to the right-wing media:

Ben Shapiro at Breitbart.com (via Fox Nation):

HILLARY: ISRAEL LACKS 'EMPATHY,' 'GENEROSITY' TOWARD PALESTINIANS

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has never been a friend to Israel. Today, speaking at the 2012 Saban Forum on US-Israel Relations, a liberal organization, she railed against Israel for supposed insensitivity, lack of empathy, and lack of generosity with regard to the Palestinians -- even as the Palestinians unilaterally violated all agreements with Israel and attempted to declare statehood, and within days of Hamas firing rockets on Israeli population centers and bombing a bus....

Gregg Re at the Daily Caller:

Hillary Clinton: Israel has 'lack of generosity ... lack of empathy' for Palestinians

Speaking at a forum at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington on Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Israel is suspicious of Palestinians and doesn’t care enough about their plight....

Pam Geller at Atlas Shrugs:

HILLARY CLINTON: HOLOCAUST VICTIMS LACK "EMPATHY," "GENEROSITY" TOWARD NAZIS

The headline may appear off, but it is not. It's the same thing. Hillary is demanding that Jews empathize with their annihilationists....

If this is on the front page of tomorrow's New York Post, I won't be surprised.

It doesn't matter that, as Remnick notes,

Clinton only prodded Israel gently, but was quicker to poke the Palestinians. "The Palestinians could have had a state as old as I am, in 1947," she said, during a short question-and-answer session. And then she spoke, without any complicating details, about how Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak offered a comprehensive deal to Arafat in 2000 and how Ehud Olmert did the same to Mahmoud Abbas.

The right-wing media will seize any opportunity and use any weapon to harm those it wishes to destroy. It's Hillary's time again. From the '08 primary season until this year's Election Day, the right-wing suspended its anti-Clinton war because the Clintons seemed to have value as a stick to beat Barack Obama with, but that's over now. It's time to do to Hillary what's been done to Obama for four years -- or, rather, to do to her what was done to her and her husband from 1992 until Obama seized the lead in '08. It's quite possible that the right won't be able to destroy her if Remnick is right and she really is planning to run for president in 2016, but it won't be for lack of trying.

MURDOCH MEDIA: Y'KNOW, ROMNEY AND STEVENS WERE RIGHT ABOUT THOSE OBAMA-VOTING PARASITES

I'm told that Republicans are asking themselves why they lost a winnable election this year, and are seriously considering steps they can take to avoid future electoral debacles.

That's what I'm told -- and then I turn to the party's de facto press office, the Murdoch media, and I see that The Wall Street Journal has just published this interview with wingnut Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield.

Mansfield basically seconds the post-election pronouncements from the Romney camp that confirmed Team Romney's contempt for ordinary voters and embarrassed the GOP. Remember Romney's declaration that Obama voters voted for the president because the president gave them "gifts"? Remember the way Republicans rushed to distance themselves from what Romney said? Not Mansfield -- and, presumably, not the Murdoch press. Mansfield more or less agrees what Romney said:

'We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency."

You could argue that Mansfield isn't as extreme as Romney, because he says that not every Obama voter voted out of greed and parasitism. But what he's saying is that the ones who didn't think that's what they were voting for were simply too ignorant to realize that that's what they were voting for. So their either leeches or idiots.

Which brings us to another Mansfield point that echoes an awkward post-election pronouncement from the Romney camp. Remember Romney strategist Stuart Stevens telling us that Romney kinda-sorta won the election because he got the votes that really mattered, the ones from white people, and from people making over $50,000 a year? Well, Mansfield agrees that Obama voters don't really count for as much as Romney voters:

" ...if we get serious about what it means to vote, we immediately go to the notion of an informed voter. And if you get serious about that, you go all the way to voting as a wise choice. That would be a true voter. The others are all lesser voters, or even not voting at all. They're just indicating a belief, or a whim, but not making a wise choice. That's probably because they're not wise."

So: Obama voters? The unfit.

(Wonder how much Mansfield thinks their votes should count. Three-fifths of a person, perhaps?)

Republicans: Do you want to save your party? Do you want it to be viable in future presidential elections? Then you need to cut Murdoch loose. He hears the messages that are alienating voters ... and gives them a massive megaphone. He stirs up the crazies who force wingnuttier-than-thou Senate and House candidates on your party. He's killing you.

Hey, maybe that's why the Obama administration seems as if it might not step in to prevent a Murdoch purchase of the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune. Murdoch wants an even bigger megaphone? Please proceed, Rupert.

TOLD YA

I've predicted that Allen West is going to run for president in 2016; I know he lost his House reelection bid this year, but to admiring wingnuts, that doesn't make him a loser -- it makes him a martyr to liberal treachery.

And now check out what he said in an NPR interview yesterday:

Look, you know, God closes a door so that he can open up greater doors. I will continue to, you know, stand up and fight for this country. That's my goal.

... And always remember, Abraham Lincoln only served one term in Congress, too.

He's running. He's definitely running. The only question is how far to the right he'll drive Jeb or Marco or whoever the Great Establishment Hope is.

ON DEVIATIONS FROM THE MASTER NARRATIVE AND THE NEW DEFINITION OF BIPARTISANSHIP

In the GOP press release about Senator Kelly Ayotte that appears disguised as an objective news story in The Washington Post today, we're reminded of a fact that's been utterly ignored by the media since we learned about it a week ago. It concerns the man Ayotte seems to have replaced as John McCain and Lindsey Graham's Third Amigo, Joe Lieberman:

Lieberman has parted ways with his longtime friends on [Susan] Rice, indicating last week that he does not think the Benghazi incident should disqualify her from serving as secretary of state.

I'm not sure why Lieberman has given up on his former full-time job of Democrat-bashing -- he must have an offer in the pipeline that's so sweet he's willing to forgo the Fox commenting gig he clearly could have for the asking.

But notice that the press has no interest whatsoever in Lieberman's deviation from Amigothink. Notice that he isn't being invited on Sunday show after Sunday show to explain his apostasy, much less to chide his former allies. Back when Lieberman was a full-time scold of the Democrats, every time he spoke the collective pulse of the Beltway press quickened, as if Sharon Stone had just sat down and crossed her legs. I'm sure the press insiders would have told us at the time that they considered Lieberman a veteran legislator with important ideas about foreign policy informed by years of experience and serious thought. Apparently, now that he's in agreement with the White House, that's no longer what he is. Who'da thunk?

****

The Ayotte profile ponders the question of whether Ayotte can attain full Amigohood:

Ayotte "can't be a Joe Lieberman," said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who has been especially vocal in defending Rice. "She's not a Democrat or an independent, and she doesn't bring value in that way. It's just three Republicans standing there going off the deep end on a situation that is not based in fact."

But Ayotte does boast some bipartisan credentials. She was twice appointed attorney general in New Hampshire, first by a Republican and then by a Democrat. And McCain and Graham have traditionally been eager to work with Democrats on a wide variety of issues, and she may fit that mold in future years.

"If she's going to replace me, they've found somebody obviously more brilliant and more beautiful," Lieberman said. He praised Ayotte and another GOP first-term senator, Florida’s Marco Rubio, for sharing his "pro-democracy, pro-freedom, keep America strong in the world" principles.

But he counseled that McCain, Graham and Ayotte will need to pull in a Democrat to join their group if their work is to continue to carry weight in the next Congress.

This is nonsense. Particularly after the last election, which turned Mitt Romney into a GOP unperson mere days after every Republican in America thought he was going to kick Obama's butt, the Beltway insiders are going to move the goalposts and declare that anyone outside the GOP's white male Bible Belt base is, by definition, a Democrat for the purposes of bipartisanship. Ayotte's a two-fer -- a New England Republican the way Romney once was, and a woman -- so she's practically a Democrat! The same goes for Senator-elect Ted Cruz of Texas: he may be a Soros-bashing, immigrant-bashing teabagger who thinks Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, but he's a Hispanic Republican, so he may the GOP's post-purist savior, according to the insiders. Ultimately, bipartisanship is going to be defined down so much -- for Republicans, though never for Democrats -- that if you deviate in even one tiny way from wingnut orthodoxy, you'll be an honorary moderate, or Democrat, or whatever suits the press's purposes.