VIOLENT TENDENCIES
How charming that we had this at CPAC this morning:
Less than an hour before Tiger Woods was set to explain himself in a press conference, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty urged conservative activists to follow the golfer’s wife and "take a nine iron and smash the windows out of big government."
... Joking about Woods' looming press conference, Pawlenty said. "I think we can learn a lot from that situation. Not from Tiger, but from his wife."
"She said she'd had enough, and we've had enough," he said. "I think we should take a nine iron and smash the windows out." ...
The quip came, of course, less than 24 hours after this:
A software engineer furious with the U.S. tax agency launched a suicide attack on it Thursday by crashing his small plane into an office building housing....
Flames shot from the building, windows exploded, a huge pillar of black smoke rose over the city, and terrified workers rushed to get out....
"It felt like a bomb blew off," said Peggy Walker, an IRS revenue officer who was sitting at her desk. "The ceiling caved in and windows blew in. We got up and ran."
... Michelle Santibanez felt the vibrations and ran to the windows, where she and her co-workers witnessed a scene that reminded them of Sept. 11.
"It was the same kind of scenario, with window panels falling out and desks falling out and paperwork flying," said Santibanez, an accountant.
...The blaze at Stack's home ... caved in the roof and blew out the windows....
(Emphasis mine throughout.)
****
One thing I learned during the busing years in Boston is how eager some people are to have a moral justification for their violent rage. It struck me that most violent haters don't really want to be evil -- they want to believe their rage is virtuous. They want someone to give them the moral license to hurt people. (The people who threw rocks at school buses really had themselves convinced that they were doing it to preserve the concept of neighborhood schools; injuring black children, they'd all have told you, wasn't the point at all.)
The craving for a license to commit violence (personally or vicariously) is why so many right-wingers absolutely wallowed in 9/11. It's why they love the "smoking gun" scenario that seems to justify torture. It's why a lot of them enjoy imagining that criminals on the rampage will compel them to retaliate with their own firearms.
Pawlenty's remark seems to be lighthearted, but it's still tapping into the notion that violence against the hated group is moral and necessary. And it's addressed, of course, to people who "came unarmed (this time)" -- or maybe just last time.
(Clip via Right Wing Watch.)
Friday, February 19, 2010
I REMEMBER WHEN TRYING TO "UNDERSTAND" TERRORISTS WAS TREASON
You probably already know about this ... and once again we learn that everything's OK if you're a Republican:
... a man flew a plane into a Texas federal building in an apparent domestic terrorist attack....
Newly-minted Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) appeared on Fox's Neil Cavuto and ... quickly shrugged off the attack....
BROWN: Well It's certainly tragic and I feel for the families obviously that are being effected by it. And I don’t know if its related but I can just sense not only in my election but since being here in Washington people are frustrated. They want transparency. They want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things effecting their daily lives. So I am not sure if there is a connection, I certainly hope not, but we need to do things better....
Remember Karl Rove, in a 2005 speech, saying that "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers"? Sounds as if Brown saw the savagery of this attack and wanted to offer therapy and understanding for any other taxpayer who's feeling a murderous rage similar to Stack's.
And Rove's line of argument actually has a long history on the right. From the "juvenile delinquent" '50s through the Nixon '60s to the Reagan '80s and Giuliani '90s, a standard right-wing critique of liberals was that they were overly concerned with finding the underlying reasons for crime -- in the stereotype, liberals said crime was all society's fault. The more sensible approach, right-wingers told us, was to say that the problem with crime was criminals, and you should just lock 'em all up. Apparently Scott Brown's reaction to Joseph Stack is to ask whether his crime is mostly society's fault.
As the GOP and the right become more and more extreme, I wonder if we're going to see more and more apologies by prominent right-wingers for anti-government pathology.
(And yes, I know I was trying to "understand" Stack yesterday. There's reason to do that -- but he did cross tyhe line into sociopathic behavior. What he did was born of craziness, I think, but it was also a crime. It wasn't a valid or reasonable response to what was happening in his life.)
You probably already know about this ... and once again we learn that everything's OK if you're a Republican:
... a man flew a plane into a Texas federal building in an apparent domestic terrorist attack....
Newly-minted Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) appeared on Fox's Neil Cavuto and ... quickly shrugged off the attack....
BROWN: Well It's certainly tragic and I feel for the families obviously that are being effected by it. And I don’t know if its related but I can just sense not only in my election but since being here in Washington people are frustrated. They want transparency. They want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things effecting their daily lives. So I am not sure if there is a connection, I certainly hope not, but we need to do things better....
Remember Karl Rove, in a 2005 speech, saying that "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers"? Sounds as if Brown saw the savagery of this attack and wanted to offer therapy and understanding for any other taxpayer who's feeling a murderous rage similar to Stack's.
And Rove's line of argument actually has a long history on the right. From the "juvenile delinquent" '50s through the Nixon '60s to the Reagan '80s and Giuliani '90s, a standard right-wing critique of liberals was that they were overly concerned with finding the underlying reasons for crime -- in the stereotype, liberals said crime was all society's fault. The more sensible approach, right-wingers told us, was to say that the problem with crime was criminals, and you should just lock 'em all up. Apparently Scott Brown's reaction to Joseph Stack is to ask whether his crime is mostly society's fault.
As the GOP and the right become more and more extreme, I wonder if we're going to see more and more apologies by prominent right-wingers for anti-government pathology.
(And yes, I know I was trying to "understand" Stack yesterday. There's reason to do that -- but he did cross tyhe line into sociopathic behavior. What he did was born of craziness, I think, but it was also a crime. It wasn't a valid or reasonable response to what was happening in his life.)
THE WORST COMMUNICATOR VS. PEOPLE WHO'LL JUST SAY ANYTHING
Hack pollster Douglas Schoen on the Wall Street Journal editorial page today:
Speaking of health care, Mr. Obama must go back to square one....
What that means very simply is that the Democrats need to start over and embrace ideas that have broad-based support, like insurance reform, cost control, affordability, eliminating denials of insurance coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and electronic record-keeping.
The president is wrong to say that doing this will be seen as capitulation to the Republicans.
Excuse me -- what on that list hasn't been embraced by Democrats, however much the House and Senate bills may have watered some of the ideas down? How are any of the items on the list Republican ideas?
It should be obvious to everyone that a passage like this is at odds with objective reality, so obvious that Schoen couldn't possibly publish it. But that's the problem -- Obama, despite his mega-awesome speeches, is a godawful communicator, and so nobody knows the truth of what Democrats are proposing, or have proposed. You can criticize the Democratic proposals any way you choose and it's plausible. (And, in addition, nobody knows that these aren't wonderful, benign, suppressed Republican ideas. Nobody knows what the Republicans' ideas actually are, or what's wrong with them.)
****
Elsewhere in the op-ed, there's another stretcher: Schoen says that the victories that gave Democrats the White House and Congress "were a reaction against the Bush spending policies and paralysis in Washington." (Emphasis mine.)
I can't blame Obama for this shameless rewriting of history -- the notion that ordinary Americans are obsessed with deficit spending is rapidly becoming conventional wisdom, and Schoen is just giving it an extra retroactive twist. (In reality, Americans just think we should act in the simple way ordinary citizens act -- in tough times, tighten your belt. They'd forget about deficits instantly if we had a real recovery.) But if the White House and Congress were giving Americans hope some other way in the midst of this gloom, the conventional Beltway wisdom wouldn't be getting traction the way it is. And that's true not just about what Schoen writes, but also about the teabagger version of reality: it would be a hell of a lot harder to get a positive response railing about "socialism" if Americans really felt they were benefiting from "socialist" policies.
Hack pollster Douglas Schoen on the Wall Street Journal editorial page today:
Speaking of health care, Mr. Obama must go back to square one....
What that means very simply is that the Democrats need to start over and embrace ideas that have broad-based support, like insurance reform, cost control, affordability, eliminating denials of insurance coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and electronic record-keeping.
The president is wrong to say that doing this will be seen as capitulation to the Republicans.
Excuse me -- what on that list hasn't been embraced by Democrats, however much the House and Senate bills may have watered some of the ideas down? How are any of the items on the list Republican ideas?
It should be obvious to everyone that a passage like this is at odds with objective reality, so obvious that Schoen couldn't possibly publish it. But that's the problem -- Obama, despite his mega-awesome speeches, is a godawful communicator, and so nobody knows the truth of what Democrats are proposing, or have proposed. You can criticize the Democratic proposals any way you choose and it's plausible. (And, in addition, nobody knows that these aren't wonderful, benign, suppressed Republican ideas. Nobody knows what the Republicans' ideas actually are, or what's wrong with them.)
****
Elsewhere in the op-ed, there's another stretcher: Schoen says that the victories that gave Democrats the White House and Congress "were a reaction against the Bush spending policies and paralysis in Washington." (Emphasis mine.)
I can't blame Obama for this shameless rewriting of history -- the notion that ordinary Americans are obsessed with deficit spending is rapidly becoming conventional wisdom, and Schoen is just giving it an extra retroactive twist. (In reality, Americans just think we should act in the simple way ordinary citizens act -- in tough times, tighten your belt. They'd forget about deficits instantly if we had a real recovery.) But if the White House and Congress were giving Americans hope some other way in the midst of this gloom, the conventional Beltway wisdom wouldn't be getting traction the way it is. And that's true not just about what Schoen writes, but also about the teabagger version of reality: it would be a hell of a lot harder to get a positive response railing about "socialism" if Americans really felt they were benefiting from "socialist" policies.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
NO FAT CHIX!!! HAR HAR HAR!!!
Spotted by a Politico video crew at the CPAC conference: a guy in a female fat suit who's supposed to be Janet Napolitano ... as a sumo wrestler.
The kid says the fat suit is supposed to represent "big government." I guess we're supposed to believe that he and his buds = are saying absolutely nothing whatsoever about Napolitano's appearance.
Gosh, I can't imagine why there's a gender gap in American politics. Can you?
Spotted by a Politico video crew at the CPAC conference: a guy in a female fat suit who's supposed to be Janet Napolitano ... as a sumo wrestler.
The kid says the fat suit is supposed to represent "big government." I guess we're supposed to believe that he and his buds = are saying absolutely nothing whatsoever about Napolitano's appearance.
Gosh, I can't imagine why there's a gender gap in American politics. Can you?
I WON'T TRY TO PIGEONHOLE JOSEPH STACK POLITICALLY -- BUT I'M AFRAID I KNOW WHO WILL
(updated a few times)
I'm just getting up to speed on the story of Joseph Stack, who died after crashing a small plane into a building housing some federal offices in Austin. I've read his suicide note. (UPDATE: That link is now offline; try this one or this one.)
Matthew Vadum of The American Spectator has already leapt in with a post titled "The Left Will Claim Austin Plane Crash Is Right-Wing Terrorism":
I'm guessing that long before the facts are known accusations will fly against the tea party movement, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and who knows who or what else for creating a climate of anti-government "hate."
Brace yourself for a vomit-inducing onslaught of indignation and self-righteousness from the usual crew of leftist reprobates like Max Blumenthal, Jon Conason, Adam Serwer, Dave Neiwert, Markos Moulitsas, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow.
Well, not me. The suicide note describes years of career struggle on Stack's part and an ongoing frustration with tax authorities.
But the tax problems started "back in the early ‘80s," according to the note -- during the Reagan years, in other words. Stack says 9/11 made it hard for him to get work -- but at that time "the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies" (Stack calls George W. Bush a "presidential puppet"). The note says no one in the government ever cut Stack a break, yet "plunderers ... commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours."
Oh, and Stack denounces the Catholic Church -- "vulgar, corrupt" -- and "the monsters of organized religion."
So how do you think the more shameless howler monkeys of the right blogosphere and punditocracy are going to react?
They're going to accuse Stack of "class warfare." They're going to say he hated God. In other words, they're going to call him "Liberal Terrorist Joseph Stack" -- probably before the day is out, and for weeks to come.
Me, I think he's just a guy who couldn't keep body and soul together, a guy whose problems were compounded by the fact that his work (as a contract worker rather than a clock-punching employee) put him under the more byzantine parts of the tax code, a circumstance he couldn't handle. It sounds as if he was a desperate guy who just lost all hope -- and all consideration for others. But I don't put him anywhere on the political spectrum.
****
UPDATE: And so it begins:
... Andrew Wilcow of the Sirius XM Conservative Talk Radio Show - The Wilcow Majority, was able to pull down a copy of Joseph Stack’s "manifesto," before the FBI pulled it off the web. It proves Joseph Stack was anti-Bush, anti-founding fathers, anti-constitution, pro-Obama and pro-communist. The left wing will get their ass handed to them on a platter when they suggest that he was an anti-establishment "tea bagger." He was in fact a left wing radical domestic terrorist.
... The left wing Harvard professor who murdered her brother and two university staff members because she didn't get tenure was a devout Obama supporter and a true progressive liberal, just like this nut who flew his airplane in to the IRS building in Austin....
Although a lot of lefties clearly want to tie this to right-wing political currents. Me, I'm not going there.
****
MORE A few topics at Yahoo Answers: "Will Joe Stack soon be revered along with other Liberal Hero's like Mao, Che Guevara and Sean Penn?"; "Was Joe Stack's suicide note littered with liberal talking points?"; "Now that we know Joe Stack was a liberal, will this terror act be the downfall of the Democrats and Obama?"; "Isn't it obvious that Joe Stack was a Liberal? I mean if he was a Conservative he would have quoted Hitler....?"
More in the same vein at Free Republic.
****
UPDATE, FRIDAY: Now it's really beginning. From David Freddoso at the Washington Examiner:
MSM denial over IRS bomber's left-wing discontent
Before crashing his plane into an IRS office building, Joe Stack wrote and posted online a diatribe against insurance and drug companies, private health care, George W. Bush, and the Catholic Church. Subtract out the subtle hints at his planned terror act, and a similar rant could have appeared in some form on any of several left-wing message boards....
More to come, I'm sure -- to be accompanied by the endless recycling of the same few quotes from the "MSM" suggesting that Stack was a teabagger.
****
UPDATE, FRIDAY P.M.: Limbaugh says Stack "sounds just like any liberal Democrat."
(updated a few times)
I'm just getting up to speed on the story of Joseph Stack, who died after crashing a small plane into a building housing some federal offices in Austin. I've read his suicide note. (UPDATE: That link is now offline; try this one or this one.)
Matthew Vadum of The American Spectator has already leapt in with a post titled "The Left Will Claim Austin Plane Crash Is Right-Wing Terrorism":
I'm guessing that long before the facts are known accusations will fly against the tea party movement, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and who knows who or what else for creating a climate of anti-government "hate."
Brace yourself for a vomit-inducing onslaught of indignation and self-righteousness from the usual crew of leftist reprobates like Max Blumenthal, Jon Conason, Adam Serwer, Dave Neiwert, Markos Moulitsas, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow.
Well, not me. The suicide note describes years of career struggle on Stack's part and an ongoing frustration with tax authorities.
But the tax problems started "back in the early ‘80s," according to the note -- during the Reagan years, in other words. Stack says 9/11 made it hard for him to get work -- but at that time "the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies" (Stack calls George W. Bush a "presidential puppet"). The note says no one in the government ever cut Stack a break, yet "plunderers ... commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours."
Oh, and Stack denounces the Catholic Church -- "vulgar, corrupt" -- and "the monsters of organized religion."
So how do you think the more shameless howler monkeys of the right blogosphere and punditocracy are going to react?
They're going to accuse Stack of "class warfare." They're going to say he hated God. In other words, they're going to call him "Liberal Terrorist Joseph Stack" -- probably before the day is out, and for weeks to come.
Me, I think he's just a guy who couldn't keep body and soul together, a guy whose problems were compounded by the fact that his work (as a contract worker rather than a clock-punching employee) put him under the more byzantine parts of the tax code, a circumstance he couldn't handle. It sounds as if he was a desperate guy who just lost all hope -- and all consideration for others. But I don't put him anywhere on the political spectrum.
****
UPDATE: And so it begins:
... Andrew Wilcow of the Sirius XM Conservative Talk Radio Show - The Wilcow Majority, was able to pull down a copy of Joseph Stack’s "manifesto," before the FBI pulled it off the web. It proves Joseph Stack was anti-Bush, anti-founding fathers, anti-constitution, pro-Obama and pro-communist. The left wing will get their ass handed to them on a platter when they suggest that he was an anti-establishment "tea bagger." He was in fact a left wing radical domestic terrorist.
... The left wing Harvard professor who murdered her brother and two university staff members because she didn't get tenure was a devout Obama supporter and a true progressive liberal, just like this nut who flew his airplane in to the IRS building in Austin....
Although a lot of lefties clearly want to tie this to right-wing political currents. Me, I'm not going there.
****
MORE A few topics at Yahoo Answers: "Will Joe Stack soon be revered along with other Liberal Hero's like Mao, Che Guevara and Sean Penn?"; "Was Joe Stack's suicide note littered with liberal talking points?"; "Now that we know Joe Stack was a liberal, will this terror act be the downfall of the Democrats and Obama?"; "Isn't it obvious that Joe Stack was a Liberal? I mean if he was a Conservative he would have quoted Hitler....?"
More in the same vein at Free Republic.
****
UPDATE, FRIDAY: Now it's really beginning. From David Freddoso at the Washington Examiner:
MSM denial over IRS bomber's left-wing discontent
Before crashing his plane into an IRS office building, Joe Stack wrote and posted online a diatribe against insurance and drug companies, private health care, George W. Bush, and the Catholic Church. Subtract out the subtle hints at his planned terror act, and a similar rant could have appeared in some form on any of several left-wing message boards....
More to come, I'm sure -- to be accompanied by the endless recycling of the same few quotes from the "MSM" suggesting that Stack was a teabagger.
****
UPDATE, FRIDAY P.M.: Limbaugh says Stack "sounds just like any liberal Democrat."
GUCCI-LOAFER POPULISM
George Will on why Sarah Palin (in his words) "is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states":
[The] reaction [against the Obama administration] is populism, a celebration of intellectual ordinariness. This is not a stance that will strengthen the Republican Party, which recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites. Besides, full-throated populism has not won a national election in 178 years, since Andrew Jackson was reelected in 1832.
... Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism ... always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution.
Jonathan Chait on why Harold Ford won't win his Senate race in New York:
Ford's candidacy is an epiphenomenon of Wall Street's retreat into a fantasy world. In this alternate reality, the titans of finance are innocent victims of a freakish accident, the Democrats' struggles result from their hostility to these victims, and the people are clamoring for a leader who will openly cater to their demands. The notion that Democratic primary voters in New York will embrace Ford may be more fantastical than the wildest investment scheme that predated the crash.
Well, yeah -- but there's an overlap between these two sentiments right now. And I'm not sure what that says about the electability of Palin and Ford (or of candidates expressing similar sentiments).
Remember what really got the tea party movement going: the trading-floor rant on CNBC by Rick Santelli. Remember that Glenn Beck denounced attempts to claw back the AIG bonuses. Remember that teabaggers and Fox think the recession is exclusively the fault of ACORN, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act. Today's populists aren't old-school populists -- they like those shiny Gucci shoes. They agree with the Wall Streeters who are backing Ford's campaign.
Ford probably can't win a Democratic primary in New York, but I wonder if he can win a general election on a third-party line, using pro-plutocrat talk to appeal to Republicans, right and right-centrist independents, and the tea party crowd. And Palin may seem like too much of a know-nothing to win over educated suburban swing voters in the 2012 general election, but she'll be pushing a plutocrat-friendly populism, and I fear a Palinesque candidate who doesn't seem like quite as much a dolt as Palin (Pawlenty?) might succeed with a similar message.
Though, really, what would be new about that? Isn't pro-plutocrat populism just Reaganism with a fresh coat of paint?
The real irony here is that a subtext of Glenn Beck's paranoid worldview is that Obama represents both the evil underclass and an evil sliver of the overclass -- ACORN plus George Soros. Yet it's actually the right at this moment that genuinely embraces a philosophy according to which Wall Street is in sync with the underclass -- the difference being that it's the white rural underclass. Could a winning coalition be forged out of that? I wish I were sure it couldn't.
George Will on why Sarah Palin (in his words) "is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states":
[The] reaction [against the Obama administration] is populism, a celebration of intellectual ordinariness. This is not a stance that will strengthen the Republican Party, which recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites. Besides, full-throated populism has not won a national election in 178 years, since Andrew Jackson was reelected in 1832.
... Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism ... always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution.
Jonathan Chait on why Harold Ford won't win his Senate race in New York:
Ford's candidacy is an epiphenomenon of Wall Street's retreat into a fantasy world. In this alternate reality, the titans of finance are innocent victims of a freakish accident, the Democrats' struggles result from their hostility to these victims, and the people are clamoring for a leader who will openly cater to their demands. The notion that Democratic primary voters in New York will embrace Ford may be more fantastical than the wildest investment scheme that predated the crash.
Well, yeah -- but there's an overlap between these two sentiments right now. And I'm not sure what that says about the electability of Palin and Ford (or of candidates expressing similar sentiments).
Remember what really got the tea party movement going: the trading-floor rant on CNBC by Rick Santelli. Remember that Glenn Beck denounced attempts to claw back the AIG bonuses. Remember that teabaggers and Fox think the recession is exclusively the fault of ACORN, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act. Today's populists aren't old-school populists -- they like those shiny Gucci shoes. They agree with the Wall Streeters who are backing Ford's campaign.
Ford probably can't win a Democratic primary in New York, but I wonder if he can win a general election on a third-party line, using pro-plutocrat talk to appeal to Republicans, right and right-centrist independents, and the tea party crowd. And Palin may seem like too much of a know-nothing to win over educated suburban swing voters in the 2012 general election, but she'll be pushing a plutocrat-friendly populism, and I fear a Palinesque candidate who doesn't seem like quite as much a dolt as Palin (Pawlenty?) might succeed with a similar message.
Though, really, what would be new about that? Isn't pro-plutocrat populism just Reaganism with a fresh coat of paint?
The real irony here is that a subtext of Glenn Beck's paranoid worldview is that Obama represents both the evil underclass and an evil sliver of the overclass -- ACORN plus George Soros. Yet it's actually the right at this moment that genuinely embraces a philosophy according to which Wall Street is in sync with the underclass -- the difference being that it's the white rural underclass. Could a winning coalition be forged out of that? I wish I were sure it couldn't.
A DOUBLE LYNCHING, IN THEIR DREAMS
I don't know what's more disturbing about the tea party clip shown below -- the quote that grabbing the headlines...
A tea party gathering in Asotin County, Washington turned more than a bit ugly on Saturday when a featured speaker actually called for the hanging of Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash)....
"How many of you have watched the movie Lonesome Dove?," asked an unidentified female speaker from the podium. "What happened to Jake when he ran with the wrong crowd? What happened to Jake when he ran with the wrong crowd. He got hung. And that's what I want to do with Patty Murray."
... or the image that appears in the clip just after the woman speaks:
It's horrifying enough that these teabaggers have a hearty chuckle over the thought of lynching Murray, but then we get "Emasculate the black guy!" Gosh, what does that bring to mind?
What great patriots these folks are.
(The clip is below. If you're having trouble watching it, go here or here.)
I don't know what's more disturbing about the tea party clip shown below -- the quote that grabbing the headlines...
A tea party gathering in Asotin County, Washington turned more than a bit ugly on Saturday when a featured speaker actually called for the hanging of Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash)....
"How many of you have watched the movie Lonesome Dove?," asked an unidentified female speaker from the podium. "What happened to Jake when he ran with the wrong crowd? What happened to Jake when he ran with the wrong crowd. He got hung. And that's what I want to do with Patty Murray."
... or the image that appears in the clip just after the woman speaks:
It's horrifying enough that these teabaggers have a hearty chuckle over the thought of lynching Murray, but then we get "Emasculate the black guy!" Gosh, what does that bring to mind?
What great patriots these folks are.
(The clip is below. If you're having trouble watching it, go here or here.)
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
OBJECTIVELY PRO-AUTO FATALITY
From a CBS story about Toyota's series of safety problems (video here):
DEAN REYNOLDS, CBS NEWS: Not everyone's on Toyota's case, though. Governors with Toyota plants in their states have now taken up the company's cause, suggesting the federal government -- which owns 60 percent of General Motors, by the way -- may have an ulterior motive. Indiana has two Toyota plants employing 5,300 workers.
GOVERNOR MITCH DANIELS (R-INDIANA): Government went in the car business, and here they are beating up on one of their direct competitors.
Right, Mitch. Toyota has no safety problems. The whole thing is just invented out of whole cloth because the evil fascist in the White House has a sick desire to seize and control American auto companies for sport. So pay no attention to the evil capitalist-hater's plot, Mr. and Mrs. America; grab the kiddies and hop in that Toyota.
For these people, there really is no point at which Obama Derangement Syndrome is overriden by other concerns, is there?
From a CBS story about Toyota's series of safety problems (video here):
DEAN REYNOLDS, CBS NEWS: Not everyone's on Toyota's case, though. Governors with Toyota plants in their states have now taken up the company's cause, suggesting the federal government -- which owns 60 percent of General Motors, by the way -- may have an ulterior motive. Indiana has two Toyota plants employing 5,300 workers.
GOVERNOR MITCH DANIELS (R-INDIANA): Government went in the car business, and here they are beating up on one of their direct competitors.
Right, Mitch. Toyota has no safety problems. The whole thing is just invented out of whole cloth because the evil fascist in the White House has a sick desire to seize and control American auto companies for sport. So pay no attention to the evil capitalist-hater's plot, Mr. and Mrs. America; grab the kiddies and hop in that Toyota.
For these people, there really is no point at which Obama Derangement Syndrome is overriden by other concerns, is there?
PALIN KNOWS WHO SIGNS HER PAYCHECKS
Sarah Palin spoke to some Republicans and teabaggers in Arkansas last night and demonstrated that when she's bought, she stays bought:
...she quickly pivoted to the broader question of whether the Tea Party movement might successfully field its own candidates in national elections, and on that point she sounded far from convinced.
"Now the smart thing will be for independents who are such a part of this Tea Party movement to, I guess, kind of start picking a party," Palin said. "Which party reflects how that smaller, smarter government steps to be taken? Which party will best fit you? And then because the Tea Party movement is not a party, and we have a two-party system, they’re going to have to pick a party and run one or the other: 'R' or 'D'."
Palin said that the Republican platform best meshed with the Tea Party’s creed.
Palin works for Fox News. Palin's book is published by another News Corporation subsidiary, HarperCollins. And, as I say over and over, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes are running the press office of the Republican Party. Their goal right now is to seize the brand "tea party" and attach it to the GOP; teabaggers who want to remain indie are going to have to do battle with the GOP and Murdoch, and there's a good chance they'll lose.
Palin is saying what her boss wants her to say. Will her efforts really help rebrand the tea party movement -- or will they just destroy the Palin brand? We'll see.
Sarah Palin spoke to some Republicans and teabaggers in Arkansas last night and demonstrated that when she's bought, she stays bought:
...she quickly pivoted to the broader question of whether the Tea Party movement might successfully field its own candidates in national elections, and on that point she sounded far from convinced.
"Now the smart thing will be for independents who are such a part of this Tea Party movement to, I guess, kind of start picking a party," Palin said. "Which party reflects how that smaller, smarter government steps to be taken? Which party will best fit you? And then because the Tea Party movement is not a party, and we have a two-party system, they’re going to have to pick a party and run one or the other: 'R' or 'D'."
Palin said that the Republican platform best meshed with the Tea Party’s creed.
Palin works for Fox News. Palin's book is published by another News Corporation subsidiary, HarperCollins. And, as I say over and over, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes are running the press office of the Republican Party. Their goal right now is to seize the brand "tea party" and attach it to the GOP; teabaggers who want to remain indie are going to have to do battle with the GOP and Murdoch, and there's a good chance they'll lose.
Palin is saying what her boss wants her to say. Will her efforts really help rebrand the tea party movement -- or will they just destroy the Palin brand? We'll see.
SMELLS LIKE TAITZ SPIRIT
Because we have a diseased political culture, this is probably enough to inoculate J.D. Hayworth against charges that he's a crazy conspiratorialist, while still permitting him to tap into the energy and votes of crazy conspiratorialists:
Hayworth: Birtherism is an 'identity theft' issue.
Last month former GOP congressman J.D. Hayworth, who is challenging Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in the Arizona Republican primary for U.S. Senate, saddled up with the far right "birthers" ... "Well, gosh, we all had to bring our birth certificates" in order "to play football," he said, adding that "the President should come forward with the information, that's all." [Monday] night on CNN, when host Campbell Brown asked if he really believes Obama is foreign-born, Hayworth dodged but later explained his comments from last month as raising from "identity theft" issues:
On the other hand, if there were a Democratic noise machine similar to the one operated by the GOP, it might now be possible to make Hayworth appear even crazier than he is, because identity theft is the focus of one of the pet conspiracies of uber-birther and barking lunatic Orly Taitz:
Taitz spoke to a crowd of about 40 at a hotel here this afternoon, and in a little over an hour threw a kitchen sink's worth of accusations at the president.
To wit: Obama has failed to produce a true copy of his Hawaii birth certificate; the birth documentation he has produced may be a forgery; Obama may have forged his selective service documents; he may have as many as 25 social security numbers; one of those numbers may have originated in Connecticut and indicates he's over 100 years old; he may have enrolled at Occidental College as a foreign exchange student; he may be guilty of wire fraud, social security fraud, mail fraud and other unspecified fraudulent acts....
If we had a left-wing Murdoch and every secular AM station in America were wall-to-wall left-wing talk, Taitz, of course, would be a household name, every American's idea of a tinfoil-hat-wearing crazy, rather than just a figure of fun in a small circle of lefty blog readers.
And if such a media world existed, Hayworth's remark and Taitz's would be interwoven in multiple stories across all media -- even far away from Arizona, just an example of how crazy those crazy Republican crazies are, one more reason why right-thinking Americans must never, ever allow these peopleto regain power.
Because we have a diseased political culture, this is probably enough to inoculate J.D. Hayworth against charges that he's a crazy conspiratorialist, while still permitting him to tap into the energy and votes of crazy conspiratorialists:
Hayworth: Birtherism is an 'identity theft' issue.
Last month former GOP congressman J.D. Hayworth, who is challenging Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in the Arizona Republican primary for U.S. Senate, saddled up with the far right "birthers" ... "Well, gosh, we all had to bring our birth certificates" in order "to play football," he said, adding that "the President should come forward with the information, that's all." [Monday] night on CNN, when host Campbell Brown asked if he really believes Obama is foreign-born, Hayworth dodged but later explained his comments from last month as raising from "identity theft" issues:
HAYWORTH: ...For example, in Scottsdale, we had a situation where we had somebody running for the council under an assumed name who was a fugitive from justice. All I'm saying is, for every race across the country, especially with identity theft in the news, it would be great that people can confirm who they say they are....
On the other hand, if there were a Democratic noise machine similar to the one operated by the GOP, it might now be possible to make Hayworth appear even crazier than he is, because identity theft is the focus of one of the pet conspiracies of uber-birther and barking lunatic Orly Taitz:
Taitz spoke to a crowd of about 40 at a hotel here this afternoon, and in a little over an hour threw a kitchen sink's worth of accusations at the president.
To wit: Obama has failed to produce a true copy of his Hawaii birth certificate; the birth documentation he has produced may be a forgery; Obama may have forged his selective service documents; he may have as many as 25 social security numbers; one of those numbers may have originated in Connecticut and indicates he's over 100 years old; he may have enrolled at Occidental College as a foreign exchange student; he may be guilty of wire fraud, social security fraud, mail fraud and other unspecified fraudulent acts....
If we had a left-wing Murdoch and every secular AM station in America were wall-to-wall left-wing talk, Taitz, of course, would be a household name, every American's idea of a tinfoil-hat-wearing crazy, rather than just a figure of fun in a small circle of lefty blog readers.
And if such a media world existed, Hayworth's remark and Taitz's would be interwoven in multiple stories across all media -- even far away from Arizona, just an example of how crazy those crazy Republican crazies are, one more reason why right-thinking Americans must never, ever allow these peopleto regain power.
REFUSING TO POINT FINGERS VS. REFUSING TO DO ANYTHING OTHER THAN POINT FINGERS
Steve Benen, in response to Joe Biden's assertion on CBS this morning that "Washington, right now, is broken":
...what officials need to understand is the importance of taking the next step -- explaining why this is and who is responsible.
As much as I'm sympathetic to the vice president's entirely accurate concerns, his omissions make all the difference. For viewers who don't know what filibusters or cloture votes are, they're thinking, "There's a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. If the system is broken and dysfunctional, maybe it's Democrats' fault." ...
Biden ... needs to name names -- Republicans broke the American legislative process. They did so deliberately, during a time of crises, because they're desperate to undercut the Democratic majority, regardless of the consequences....
Right -- because, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, if Democrats don't assess blame, Republicans will. See today's Wall Street Journal editorial page:
...The real story ... is the failure once again of liberal governance.
For the fourth time since the 1960s, American voters in 2008 gave Democrats overwhelming control of both Congress and the White House.... Yet once again, Democratic leaders have tried to govern the country from the left, only to find that their policies have hit a wall of practical and popular resistance.
Democrats failed in the latter half of the 1960s, as the twin burdens of the Great Society and Vietnam ended the Kennedy boom and split their party. They failed again after Watergate, as Congress dragged Jimmy Carter to the left and liberals had no answer for stagflation. They failed a third time in the first two Bill Clinton years, as tax increases and HillaryCare led to the Gingrich Congress before Mr. Clinton salvaged his Presidency by tacking to the center....
Never mind the fact that the Clinton tax increases actually worked. And pay no attention to the weakness of the Obama stimulus or the total failure, so far, to reform the financial sector. Utterly ignore GOP and Blue Dog obstructionism that makes every bill worse (and less progressive). This is a much simpler explanation: everything that's being done is liberal. And if it hasn't succeeded yet, then it failed, and liberalism failed -- because liberalism always fails.
Note that this isn't just assessing blame -- it's saying that failure is an innate part of liberalism. It's what the right-wing message machine does so well: it doesn't just fight whatever battles are at hand, it carefully develops, and endlessly promulgates, an overarching narrative in which all evil is always on our side.
By contrast, Joe Biden won't even assess a little bit of blame in the circumstances at hand. To Biden (and his boss), this isn't even a momentary battle; to the GOP, by contrast, this is total war. And it's a long war.
Steve Benen, in response to Joe Biden's assertion on CBS this morning that "Washington, right now, is broken":
...what officials need to understand is the importance of taking the next step -- explaining why this is and who is responsible.
As much as I'm sympathetic to the vice president's entirely accurate concerns, his omissions make all the difference. For viewers who don't know what filibusters or cloture votes are, they're thinking, "There's a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. If the system is broken and dysfunctional, maybe it's Democrats' fault." ...
Biden ... needs to name names -- Republicans broke the American legislative process. They did so deliberately, during a time of crises, because they're desperate to undercut the Democratic majority, regardless of the consequences....
Right -- because, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, if Democrats don't assess blame, Republicans will. See today's Wall Street Journal editorial page:
...The real story ... is the failure once again of liberal governance.
For the fourth time since the 1960s, American voters in 2008 gave Democrats overwhelming control of both Congress and the White House.... Yet once again, Democratic leaders have tried to govern the country from the left, only to find that their policies have hit a wall of practical and popular resistance.
Democrats failed in the latter half of the 1960s, as the twin burdens of the Great Society and Vietnam ended the Kennedy boom and split their party. They failed again after Watergate, as Congress dragged Jimmy Carter to the left and liberals had no answer for stagflation. They failed a third time in the first two Bill Clinton years, as tax increases and HillaryCare led to the Gingrich Congress before Mr. Clinton salvaged his Presidency by tacking to the center....
Never mind the fact that the Clinton tax increases actually worked. And pay no attention to the weakness of the Obama stimulus or the total failure, so far, to reform the financial sector. Utterly ignore GOP and Blue Dog obstructionism that makes every bill worse (and less progressive). This is a much simpler explanation: everything that's being done is liberal. And if it hasn't succeeded yet, then it failed, and liberalism failed -- because liberalism always fails.
Note that this isn't just assessing blame -- it's saying that failure is an innate part of liberalism. It's what the right-wing message machine does so well: it doesn't just fight whatever battles are at hand, it carefully develops, and endlessly promulgates, an overarching narrative in which all evil is always on our side.
By contrast, Joe Biden won't even assess a little bit of blame in the circumstances at hand. To Biden (and his boss), this isn't even a momentary battle; to the GOP, by contrast, this is total war. And it's a long war.
GET MAD, GET EVEN, THEN GET EVEN AGAIN
I think we all have much more important things to worry about than this:
A new mini-series about John F. Kennedy's presidency ... is the brainchild of Joel Surnow, a creator of the Fox action show "24" and an outspoken political conservative. That raised alarms among Kennedy partisans when the History channel said in December that it would pick up the project.
Now a documentary filmmaker who makes no secret of his liberal politics is releasing an Internet video in which Kennedy scholars say the scripts offer a portrait of the president and his family that is, at best, inaccurate, and at worst, a hatchet job.
"It was political character assassination," the filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, said of the screenplays in a telephone interview....
JFK has never struck me as a great progressive hero. (My favorite fun fact, gleaned from this book: Kennedy gave money to the campaign of Richard Nixon, his fellow Cold Warrior, rather than Helen Gahagan Douglas, his fellow Democrat, in the 1950 California Senate race.) And most of the supposed outrages found in the screenplay so far seem like small beer:
For example, they say the scripts refer to exit polling for the 1960 presidential election when exit polling had not yet been invented; and that President Kennedy introduced the Peace Corps during the Bay of Pigs crisis in April 1961, when in fact he signed an executive order creating the corps one month earlier.
In another scene cited, a Secret Service agent approaches the president while he is having sex in a pool with a young woman who is not his wife; in yet another, the president asks his brother Robert, "What do you do when you're horny?" and tells him that if he doesn't have sex with unfamiliar women "every couple of days I get migraines."
Well, both the pool-sex story and the migraine story come directly from ... er, Seymour Hersh. The belief that JFK liked a bit of strange on the side is not a wingnut-only conspiracy theory -- to put it mildly.
But it does seem that this is Wingnut World still seeking revenge after actually getting revenge:
... the debate around "The Kennedys" recalls a similar flare-up around the mini-series called "The Reagans" that CBS was to show in 2003. In that case the network canceled its planned broadcast after conservatives criticized the project -- before it was shown, and based on scripts and portions of the film.
The Reagan mini-series was bumped to cable. That was a win for the right. But it wasn't enough of a win. Another win was needed. So there's this -- and this is merely on cable, so surely there'll have to be even more payback down the line. I'm sure Joel Surnow or someone else on the right is hard at work on an FDR miniseries that focuses exclusively on adultery, Japanese interment camps, and "forgotten men" who didn't find work. And that one bloody well better air on a network.
I am amused, though, by the right's Kennedy obsession. I think I understand it: it's less because of Ted Kennedy's liberalism or Robert's late-life conversion to the antiwar cause than it is about, well, cosmopolitanism. The Kennedys are Eastern, Ivy League, cultured wealthy Democrats; their lifestyle, combined with their politics, is what allegedly makes them enemies of right-thinking heartland Americans. Every time a Republican effete-baits Barack Obama, or Al Gore, or Mike Dukakis for heaven's sake, it's basically a way of saying the Democrat is a Kennedy. And yet the Kennedys are widely admired, which is what's galling to the right, and must be reversed.
I think we all have much more important things to worry about than this:
A new mini-series about John F. Kennedy's presidency ... is the brainchild of Joel Surnow, a creator of the Fox action show "24" and an outspoken political conservative. That raised alarms among Kennedy partisans when the History channel said in December that it would pick up the project.
Now a documentary filmmaker who makes no secret of his liberal politics is releasing an Internet video in which Kennedy scholars say the scripts offer a portrait of the president and his family that is, at best, inaccurate, and at worst, a hatchet job.
"It was political character assassination," the filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, said of the screenplays in a telephone interview....
JFK has never struck me as a great progressive hero. (My favorite fun fact, gleaned from this book: Kennedy gave money to the campaign of Richard Nixon, his fellow Cold Warrior, rather than Helen Gahagan Douglas, his fellow Democrat, in the 1950 California Senate race.) And most of the supposed outrages found in the screenplay so far seem like small beer:
For example, they say the scripts refer to exit polling for the 1960 presidential election when exit polling had not yet been invented; and that President Kennedy introduced the Peace Corps during the Bay of Pigs crisis in April 1961, when in fact he signed an executive order creating the corps one month earlier.
In another scene cited, a Secret Service agent approaches the president while he is having sex in a pool with a young woman who is not his wife; in yet another, the president asks his brother Robert, "What do you do when you're horny?" and tells him that if he doesn't have sex with unfamiliar women "every couple of days I get migraines."
Well, both the pool-sex story and the migraine story come directly from ... er, Seymour Hersh. The belief that JFK liked a bit of strange on the side is not a wingnut-only conspiracy theory -- to put it mildly.
But it does seem that this is Wingnut World still seeking revenge after actually getting revenge:
... the debate around "The Kennedys" recalls a similar flare-up around the mini-series called "The Reagans" that CBS was to show in 2003. In that case the network canceled its planned broadcast after conservatives criticized the project -- before it was shown, and based on scripts and portions of the film.
The Reagan mini-series was bumped to cable. That was a win for the right. But it wasn't enough of a win. Another win was needed. So there's this -- and this is merely on cable, so surely there'll have to be even more payback down the line. I'm sure Joel Surnow or someone else on the right is hard at work on an FDR miniseries that focuses exclusively on adultery, Japanese interment camps, and "forgotten men" who didn't find work. And that one bloody well better air on a network.
I am amused, though, by the right's Kennedy obsession. I think I understand it: it's less because of Ted Kennedy's liberalism or Robert's late-life conversion to the antiwar cause than it is about, well, cosmopolitanism. The Kennedys are Eastern, Ivy League, cultured wealthy Democrats; their lifestyle, combined with their politics, is what allegedly makes them enemies of right-thinking heartland Americans. Every time a Republican effete-baits Barack Obama, or Al Gore, or Mike Dukakis for heaven's sake, it's basically a way of saying the Democrat is a Kennedy. And yet the Kennedys are widely admired, which is what's galling to the right, and must be reversed.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
FROM HIPPIE-PUNCHER TO PUNCHED HIPPIE?
I agree with most observers that an Evan Bayh challenge to Barack Obama in the 2012 Democratic primaries is highly unlikely -- even as his ratings slip among other groups, Obama has 80+% approval among Democrats, according to Gallup -- but I think a third-party challenge (yes, perhaps under the aegis "Unity12") is entirely possible. I suppose you can't blame the SOB -- it's quite possible the GOP nominee will be a still unelectably extremist Sarah Palin, while it will probably be easy over the next few years to push the meme that Barack Obama is a mirror-image extremist of the left (just because it's always easy to push memes like that).
But I think Bayh is assuming he's going to be able to take advantage of all the liberal-bashing he's done over the years. If so, he's nuts. Oh, sure, if he really does seem able to split the Democratic and Democrat-leaning vote without cutting into GOP totals, then he'll be given free rein by the GOP ... but if he threatens to peel off swing voters the Republicans need to win, he's going to be the hippie that gets punched.
Even now, the Media Research Center isn't taking kindly to a suggestion that Bayh was a right-wingers' kind of Democrat:
On Monday's Rick's List, CNN's Rick Sanchez and Jessica Yellin both tried to portray liberal Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh as a centrist. Yellin insisted, "Republicans should be sad to see Evan Bayh go because he is one of the centrists who worked very hard to work with Republicans." Sanchez replied, Evan Bayh is no liberal!"
... Actually, Bayh has a liberal voting record during his time in Senate. His lifetime ACU rating is 20.70, and his 2009 ADA score is 70%. That must be what CNN considers to be "centrist."
And there's actually more where that came from --middling to very high ratings from NARAL, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, La Raza, the League of Conservation Voters, SEIU, and so on, and weak to downright lousy numbers from the Christian Coalition, National Right to Life Committee, Americans for Tax Reform, FreedomWorks, Citizens Against Government Waste, and other right-leaning groups. Yeah, Bayh really is anti-liberal -- but by the time the GOP noise machine gets finished cherry-picking that voting record (assuming he really is a threat to the Republican nominee), he's going to be wearing tie-dye and patchouli in the public's mind.
In a way, it's just what he deserves.
I agree with most observers that an Evan Bayh challenge to Barack Obama in the 2012 Democratic primaries is highly unlikely -- even as his ratings slip among other groups, Obama has 80+% approval among Democrats, according to Gallup -- but I think a third-party challenge (yes, perhaps under the aegis "Unity12") is entirely possible. I suppose you can't blame the SOB -- it's quite possible the GOP nominee will be a still unelectably extremist Sarah Palin, while it will probably be easy over the next few years to push the meme that Barack Obama is a mirror-image extremist of the left (just because it's always easy to push memes like that).
But I think Bayh is assuming he's going to be able to take advantage of all the liberal-bashing he's done over the years. If so, he's nuts. Oh, sure, if he really does seem able to split the Democratic and Democrat-leaning vote without cutting into GOP totals, then he'll be given free rein by the GOP ... but if he threatens to peel off swing voters the Republicans need to win, he's going to be the hippie that gets punched.
Even now, the Media Research Center isn't taking kindly to a suggestion that Bayh was a right-wingers' kind of Democrat:
On Monday's Rick's List, CNN's Rick Sanchez and Jessica Yellin both tried to portray liberal Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh as a centrist. Yellin insisted, "Republicans should be sad to see Evan Bayh go because he is one of the centrists who worked very hard to work with Republicans." Sanchez replied, Evan Bayh is no liberal!"
... Actually, Bayh has a liberal voting record during his time in Senate. His lifetime ACU rating is 20.70, and his 2009 ADA score is 70%. That must be what CNN considers to be "centrist."
And there's actually more where that came from --middling to very high ratings from NARAL, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, La Raza, the League of Conservation Voters, SEIU, and so on, and weak to downright lousy numbers from the Christian Coalition, National Right to Life Committee, Americans for Tax Reform, FreedomWorks, Citizens Against Government Waste, and other right-leaning groups. Yeah, Bayh really is anti-liberal -- but by the time the GOP noise machine gets finished cherry-picking that voting record (assuming he really is a threat to the Republican nominee), he's going to be wearing tie-dye and patchouli in the public's mind.
In a way, it's just what he deserves.
THIS IS WHY FOX AND THE GOP WANT TO DOMESTICATE THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT
As Right Wing Watch notes today, The New York Times is reporting this about a significant segment of the tea party movement...
Tea Party gatherings are full of people who say they would do away with the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax and countless agencies, not to mention bailouts and stimulus packages. Nor is it unusual to hear calls to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.... Some of the prescriptions they are debating -- secession, tax boycotts, states "nullifying" federal laws, forming citizen militias -- are outside the mainstream, too.
...at a time when this is taking place:
About 50 leaders of the grass-roots "tea party" movement will meet in Washington on Tuesday with Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele and other top GOP operatives to discuss campaign strategies and conservative principles....
Now, you'd think this might cause a bit of an optics problem for the GOP, and for the right in general.
But I'm not so sure. I look at the recent history of the anti-abortion movement, and it seems to me that having a good-zealot/bad-zealot strategy has been highly effective. Oh, sure, abortion is still legal and the White House and Congress are run by the (nominally) pro-choice party. But abortion rights are in a slow but inexorable retreat. What's more, the actions of of the "bad zealots" -- shooting abortion providers and whatnot -- are now treated by conventional-wisdom purveyors as stuff done by the marginal bad people, who are not to be confused with the fine, virtuous, respectable anti-choice folks in the C.W. purveyors' Rolodexes. How does that work out for the movement? Well, the shooting of George Tiller didn't exactly slow down Bart Stupak, did it?
Fox and the GOP are hard at work nurturing what they hope we'll come to see as the mainstream of the tea party movement -- just a bunch of nice patriots who simply want Republicans to act more like true conservatives. To someone who takes a close look, it might not be easy to tell where the "good zealots" and and the gun-toting, conspiracy-mongering "bad zealots" begin -- but the hope is that casual observers (and the mainstream media) will accept the argument that any ugliness arising from the movement is from the discredited, unrepresentative fringe-dwellers.
And meanwhile, in the real world, some of the passion of those fringe-dwellers will be of use to the GOP, even as the GOP inoculates itself against any sense of association with them.
And yes, this would work just the opposite way, with the non-crazies always being forced to answer for the crazies, if this were a left-leaning movement. But, well, it isn't, so the rules are different.
As Right Wing Watch notes today, The New York Times is reporting this about a significant segment of the tea party movement...
Tea Party gatherings are full of people who say they would do away with the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax and countless agencies, not to mention bailouts and stimulus packages. Nor is it unusual to hear calls to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.... Some of the prescriptions they are debating -- secession, tax boycotts, states "nullifying" federal laws, forming citizen militias -- are outside the mainstream, too.
...at a time when this is taking place:
About 50 leaders of the grass-roots "tea party" movement will meet in Washington on Tuesday with Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele and other top GOP operatives to discuss campaign strategies and conservative principles....
Now, you'd think this might cause a bit of an optics problem for the GOP, and for the right in general.
But I'm not so sure. I look at the recent history of the anti-abortion movement, and it seems to me that having a good-zealot/bad-zealot strategy has been highly effective. Oh, sure, abortion is still legal and the White House and Congress are run by the (nominally) pro-choice party. But abortion rights are in a slow but inexorable retreat. What's more, the actions of of the "bad zealots" -- shooting abortion providers and whatnot -- are now treated by conventional-wisdom purveyors as stuff done by the marginal bad people, who are not to be confused with the fine, virtuous, respectable anti-choice folks in the C.W. purveyors' Rolodexes. How does that work out for the movement? Well, the shooting of George Tiller didn't exactly slow down Bart Stupak, did it?
Fox and the GOP are hard at work nurturing what they hope we'll come to see as the mainstream of the tea party movement -- just a bunch of nice patriots who simply want Republicans to act more like true conservatives. To someone who takes a close look, it might not be easy to tell where the "good zealots" and and the gun-toting, conspiracy-mongering "bad zealots" begin -- but the hope is that casual observers (and the mainstream media) will accept the argument that any ugliness arising from the movement is from the discredited, unrepresentative fringe-dwellers.
And meanwhile, in the real world, some of the passion of those fringe-dwellers will be of use to the GOP, even as the GOP inoculates itself against any sense of association with them.
And yes, this would work just the opposite way, with the non-crazies always being forced to answer for the crazies, if this were a left-leaning movement. But, well, it isn't, so the rules are different.
BARACK OBAMA, STEELY-EYED ROCKET MAN
Hey, who would have predicted that this was going to be the area of Barack Obama greatest success as president?
The Taliban's top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials.
The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks....
Note that he was "captured several days ag." Regarding the rollout of the news, Juan Cole makes a very interesting point:
...that Joe Biden and others kept the arrest secret, in order to allow further operations against Taliban leaders in Karachi, shows a discipline that Bush and Cheney never had. They were always happy to prematurely release details of ongoing investigations to get a political bump, even if it meant allowing terrorists to escape.
Yup -- Biden was dispatched over the weekend to rebut Cheney's "wimp"-baiting and he said nothing. Very disciplined.
But guys? You should probably take at least a small victory lap. There has to be something you can do that's more than stoic silence but still well short of the "Mission Accomplished" flyboy stunt. At least send Biden to the morning shows to talk about the capture ... subtly, but with pride.
I bet Cheney wouldn't offer himself up for a similar round of interviews. Not at this time.
Hey, who would have predicted that this was going to be the area of Barack Obama greatest success as president?
The Taliban's top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials.
The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks....
Note that he was "captured several days ag." Regarding the rollout of the news, Juan Cole makes a very interesting point:
...that Joe Biden and others kept the arrest secret, in order to allow further operations against Taliban leaders in Karachi, shows a discipline that Bush and Cheney never had. They were always happy to prematurely release details of ongoing investigations to get a political bump, even if it meant allowing terrorists to escape.
Yup -- Biden was dispatched over the weekend to rebut Cheney's "wimp"-baiting and he said nothing. Very disciplined.
But guys? You should probably take at least a small victory lap. There has to be something you can do that's more than stoic silence but still well short of the "Mission Accomplished" flyboy stunt. At least send Biden to the morning shows to talk about the capture ... subtly, but with pride.
I bet Cheney wouldn't offer himself up for a similar round of interviews. Not at this time.
Monday, February 15, 2010
ONCE AGAIN, REPUBLICANS SAY EVERYTHING BAD IS DEMOCRATIC
Over at the Daily Beast, Peter Beinart actually appropriately chides current Republicans for attacking anti-terrorism steps by the Obama administration that they considered just fine in the Bush years. But I think Beinart is overstating the importance of this:
On the surface, the sides are clear: Republican versus Democrat, liberal versus conservative, hawk versus dove. But the more you examine Cheney's attacks on Obama, the more it looks like Obama has simply gotten caught in the crossfire of an intra-Republican civil war. Cheney’s real target may be less Obama than his predecessor, George W. Bush....
On Sunday, Cheney appeared on ABC's This Week with Jonathan Karl...
Usually, when reporters ask politicians why they're attacking the other party for things their own side has done they deny that there is any double standard, and find some distinction to suggest that what the other guys are doing is much worse. Cheney didn’t do that. To the contrary, he repeatedly acknowledged that his gripes with Obama are also gripes with George W. Bush....
You have to hand it to the guy. He may be an ideological fanatic, but he's no partisan hack. Time and again, with barely a nudge from the questioner, Cheney essentially volunteered that, "Yes, George W. Bush was soft on terror, too." ...
Really, I wouldn't make too much of this. It's just the foreign policy version of the current GOP message about spending and deficits: yes, members of our party did things we now denounce, but that just means those members weren't true Republicans. They were honorary Democrats. So it's still Democrats who suck.
Over at the Daily Beast, Peter Beinart actually appropriately chides current Republicans for attacking anti-terrorism steps by the Obama administration that they considered just fine in the Bush years. But I think Beinart is overstating the importance of this:
On the surface, the sides are clear: Republican versus Democrat, liberal versus conservative, hawk versus dove. But the more you examine Cheney's attacks on Obama, the more it looks like Obama has simply gotten caught in the crossfire of an intra-Republican civil war. Cheney’s real target may be less Obama than his predecessor, George W. Bush....
On Sunday, Cheney appeared on ABC's This Week with Jonathan Karl...
Usually, when reporters ask politicians why they're attacking the other party for things their own side has done they deny that there is any double standard, and find some distinction to suggest that what the other guys are doing is much worse. Cheney didn’t do that. To the contrary, he repeatedly acknowledged that his gripes with Obama are also gripes with George W. Bush....
You have to hand it to the guy. He may be an ideological fanatic, but he's no partisan hack. Time and again, with barely a nudge from the questioner, Cheney essentially volunteered that, "Yes, George W. Bush was soft on terror, too." ...
Really, I wouldn't make too much of this. It's just the foreign policy version of the current GOP message about spending and deficits: yes, members of our party did things we now denounce, but that just means those members weren't true Republicans. They were honorary Democrats. So it's still Democrats who suck.
EVAN BAYH RETIRES
Hey, this guy's from Indiana, right?
Hell, he couldn't do worse than whatever party hack is actually going to run against Dan Coats, could he?
****
UPDATE: Apparently this has crossed others' minds, though it's not exactly a popular groundswell.
Hey, this guy's from Indiana, right?
Hell, he couldn't do worse than whatever party hack is actually going to run against Dan Coats, could he?
****
UPDATE: Apparently this has crossed others' minds, though it's not exactly a popular groundswell.
NAHHH, THAT WON'T WORK
Kevin Drum a couple of days ago, in response to a Bob Herbert column about China's push to develop green energy technology:
...lately become more receptive to the idea that, for better or worse, the only way to get Americans to take this stuff seriously is to kick it old school and start hauling out that old time Cold War evangelism. Frame green tech as a matter of vital economic and national security superiority over the Reds and quit worrying overmuch about whether that's really technically accurate. Just figure that it's close enough, it's language everyone understands, and it'll do a better job of motivating development than a couple hundred more PowerPoints about receding glaciers.
But that won't work. The wingers have a boilerplate answer on the subject of energy independence: "Drill, baby, drill!" The more "thoughtful" version of this is to call for "an all-of-the-above approach" to energy, which means, yeah, the green stuff, but as window dressing for ANWR drilling and more pumping of natural gas and more nuclear power -- basically, whatever is as satisfying as punching hippies. (Sarah Palin, of course, has used both of these catchphrases. And they're as substantive as the arguments from the right-center and right seem to get.)
And oddly, this seems to be the first clash-of-civilizations moment in which there isn't a vague sense of unease on the right or center-right about the possibility that our adversaries, however distasteful, might have a more successful, more disciplined approach to the cultural, economic, and/or techonological battle, and might therefore bury us. We certainly heard that about the Nazis in the 1930s, and there was some anxiety about the Reds during the Cold War -- that's how we got into the space race. A generation ago, we feared the Japanese were going to clean our clocks.
But, for some reason, there don't seem to be a similar sense about the Chinese, at least not to the right of Tom Friedman. No one thinks the American way makes us "weak" or "undisciplined" (those attributes are ascribed only to us evil Democrats and liberals). The right simply doesn't think China poses a threat, or, if there is a threat, it's one that can be cured simply, by overthrowing evil liberal subversion and deficit spending (which, of course, only liberals do).
So appeals to patriotism won't work. We're #1! Or we would be if Sarah Palin, or someone with a Palinesque energy policy, were president.
Kevin Drum a couple of days ago, in response to a Bob Herbert column about China's push to develop green energy technology:
...lately become more receptive to the idea that, for better or worse, the only way to get Americans to take this stuff seriously is to kick it old school and start hauling out that old time Cold War evangelism. Frame green tech as a matter of vital economic and national security superiority over the Reds and quit worrying overmuch about whether that's really technically accurate. Just figure that it's close enough, it's language everyone understands, and it'll do a better job of motivating development than a couple hundred more PowerPoints about receding glaciers.
But that won't work. The wingers have a boilerplate answer on the subject of energy independence: "Drill, baby, drill!" The more "thoughtful" version of this is to call for "an all-of-the-above approach" to energy, which means, yeah, the green stuff, but as window dressing for ANWR drilling and more pumping of natural gas and more nuclear power -- basically, whatever is as satisfying as punching hippies. (Sarah Palin, of course, has used both of these catchphrases. And they're as substantive as the arguments from the right-center and right seem to get.)
And oddly, this seems to be the first clash-of-civilizations moment in which there isn't a vague sense of unease on the right or center-right about the possibility that our adversaries, however distasteful, might have a more successful, more disciplined approach to the cultural, economic, and/or techonological battle, and might therefore bury us. We certainly heard that about the Nazis in the 1930s, and there was some anxiety about the Reds during the Cold War -- that's how we got into the space race. A generation ago, we feared the Japanese were going to clean our clocks.
But, for some reason, there don't seem to be a similar sense about the Chinese, at least not to the right of Tom Friedman. No one thinks the American way makes us "weak" or "undisciplined" (those attributes are ascribed only to us evil Democrats and liberals). The right simply doesn't think China poses a threat, or, if there is a threat, it's one that can be cured simply, by overthrowing evil liberal subversion and deficit spending (which, of course, only liberals do).
So appeals to patriotism won't work. We're #1! Or we would be if Sarah Palin, or someone with a Palinesque energy policy, were president.
APPLES AND ORANGES
(now updated)
The wingnuts are having a schadenfreude-gasm because Amy Bishop, a Massachusetts native and Harvard grad charged with killing three people at the University of Alabama after losing a tenure battle, was, in the words of the non-Murdoch but Murdochesque Boston Herald, "a far-left political extremist who was 'obsessed' with President Obama" (according to "a family source") and was described as a "socialist" by one commenter at ratemyprofessors.com.
This is especially delicious for wingnuts because Bishop also shot and killed her brother as a teenager, a shooting that was ruled an accident at the time, and was questioned in 1993 about the mailing of a pipe bomb to a professor with whom she had a dispute, although she was cleared.
Oh, the joy! "Socialism" killed and endangered all those people ... right?
Er, no. Let's say it's true that Bishop really did kill her brother out of malice, and that she sent that pipe bomb. Add that to the Huntsville murders.
Was any of this done out of a political motive?
Right-winger James von Brunn shot up the Holocaust Museum as a right-wing political act. Right-winger Scott Roeder murdered Dr. George Tiller as a right-wing political act. And it seems certain that right-winger Greg Girard was stockpiling weapons he could use for right-wing political acts -- resistance to the Obama administration's imaginary "secret police" -- that he envisioned.
I don't see politics (as opposed to office politics) as the motive for anything Amy Bishop is accused of. She may be a sociopathic nut, but her sociopathy is apolitical. Unless that changes, it's apples and oranges.
*****
UPDATE: Donald Douglas of American Power, one of the wingnuts I quote above, says about lefties' responses to this case:
They keep looking for "motive" (here)....
That link is a link to this post -- in other words, according to Mr. Douglas, what I write above is a search for motive.
I keep looking for evidence that Donald Douglas can read. I say above that wingnuts like him are looking for links between Bishop's politics and the killings, in order to score political points. That seems glaringly obvious. Is there anything I say above that offers positive speculation regarding motive? All I do is discount any connection between Bishop's politics and the crimes. That's because all the evidence suggests that politics wasn't her motive.
Douglas, of course, is engaging in a massive amount of projection, because he thinks every terrible moment in Bishop's history is the result of a vast conspiracy, on the part of Bishop and others, to kill and cover up killings and explain away killings, all of it motivated by evil Satanic leftism:
Not only is Amy Bishop a leftist who killed her brother and got a pass from the politically correct criminal justice system (especially Democratic Congressman and then-Massachusetts DA Bill Delahunt), she's also a suspected pipe bomber who is now accused of premeditated murder of three faculty colleagues who were presiding over her tenure case. But add on top of this the fact that the premeditation included the planned killings of three non-white colleages and this really should be explosive for the radical multiculturalists.... perish the thought that Bishop's motive could have been racism? Maybe Harvard-trained left-wing professors get a pass on that.
In wingnut Cloud-Cuckooland, of course, all lefties are racist and all racists are lefties.
You know what? I have no freaking idea whether there was a racial motive in these killings. I know that, when you dig into the past, the intended pipe-bomb victim was white, and Bishop's brother was white. MaybeDavid Dwayne Dilbert D'Artagnan Donald Douglas has an explanation for how those crimes, if she's guilty of them, fits his new theory of racism. Maybe back then she was trying to eliminate the white race, one whitey every few years, as a revolutionary act. I sure hope he tells us. He has such insight into the criminal mind -- I'm dying to know.
(now updated)
The wingnuts are having a schadenfreude-gasm because Amy Bishop, a Massachusetts native and Harvard grad charged with killing three people at the University of Alabama after losing a tenure battle, was, in the words of the non-Murdoch but Murdochesque Boston Herald, "a far-left political extremist who was 'obsessed' with President Obama" (according to "a family source") and was described as a "socialist" by one commenter at ratemyprofessors.com.
This is especially delicious for wingnuts because Bishop also shot and killed her brother as a teenager, a shooting that was ruled an accident at the time, and was questioned in 1993 about the mailing of a pipe bomb to a professor with whom she had a dispute, although she was cleared.
Oh, the joy! "Socialism" killed and endangered all those people ... right?
Er, no. Let's say it's true that Bishop really did kill her brother out of malice, and that she sent that pipe bomb. Add that to the Huntsville murders.
Was any of this done out of a political motive?
Right-winger James von Brunn shot up the Holocaust Museum as a right-wing political act. Right-winger Scott Roeder murdered Dr. George Tiller as a right-wing political act. And it seems certain that right-winger Greg Girard was stockpiling weapons he could use for right-wing political acts -- resistance to the Obama administration's imaginary "secret police" -- that he envisioned.
I don't see politics (as opposed to office politics) as the motive for anything Amy Bishop is accused of. She may be a sociopathic nut, but her sociopathy is apolitical. Unless that changes, it's apples and oranges.
*****
UPDATE: Donald Douglas of American Power, one of the wingnuts I quote above, says about lefties' responses to this case:
They keep looking for "motive" (here)....
That link is a link to this post -- in other words, according to Mr. Douglas, what I write above is a search for motive.
I keep looking for evidence that Donald Douglas can read. I say above that wingnuts like him are looking for links between Bishop's politics and the killings, in order to score political points. That seems glaringly obvious. Is there anything I say above that offers positive speculation regarding motive? All I do is discount any connection between Bishop's politics and the crimes. That's because all the evidence suggests that politics wasn't her motive.
Douglas, of course, is engaging in a massive amount of projection, because he thinks every terrible moment in Bishop's history is the result of a vast conspiracy, on the part of Bishop and others, to kill and cover up killings and explain away killings, all of it motivated by evil Satanic leftism:
Not only is Amy Bishop a leftist who killed her brother and got a pass from the politically correct criminal justice system (especially Democratic Congressman and then-Massachusetts DA Bill Delahunt), she's also a suspected pipe bomber who is now accused of premeditated murder of three faculty colleagues who were presiding over her tenure case. But add on top of this the fact that the premeditation included the planned killings of three non-white colleages and this really should be explosive for the radical multiculturalists.... perish the thought that Bishop's motive could have been racism? Maybe Harvard-trained left-wing professors get a pass on that.
In wingnut Cloud-Cuckooland, of course, all lefties are racist and all racists are lefties.
You know what? I have no freaking idea whether there was a racial motive in these killings. I know that, when you dig into the past, the intended pipe-bomb victim was white, and Bishop's brother was white. Maybe
Sunday, February 14, 2010
MITT ROMNEY WILL NOT BE THE 2012 GOP PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE
David Bernstein of The Boston Phoenix has reviewed Mitt Romney's book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, which will hit the stores on March 2 -- and, well, a few bits of it do sound like red meat for the drooling masses in his party:
He is convinced (although I'm not sure why) that Barack Obama's open engagement with the world will plunge us from our perch -- what with Obama's acknowledgement of American mistakes, his willingness to negotiate with hostile nations, and his elevation of such concerns as "common interest of human beings," and "mutual respect" and "mutual interests" among nations.
Romney claims that this is already responsible for America's "flagging popular appeal" around the globe....
But the rest of the book, if the review is to be believed, seems like a political suicide note:
The ranting right-winger Romney we saw through much of the 2008 campaign is largely absent from this book. He makes only brief mention of abortion or homosexuals, or even the illegal-immigration issue with which he hammered John McCain. The momentary populist spasm that led him to vow to save every Michigan auto worker's job has been shunned; so has the weird enthusiasm for torture....
And, unlike most of his prominent Republican contemporaries, Romney doesn't once call anyone a socialist in this book. He barely even has a bad word for the media.
He wants to be the GOP nominee in three years. What the hell is he thinking?
But wait -- he says some things that are even more self-sabotaging:
- "Climate change is occurring," and is caused at least in part by human activity. "Global warming is a real and present danger."
- The 2008 TARP bank bailout was necessary and "did in fact keep our economy from total meltdown." ...
- The financial meltdown was not merely the fault of Democrats and poor people....
- A stimulus package "was called for" after the late-2008 economic downturn, and the Democrats' stimulus "will accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery."
- Privatizing Social Security would be a mistake; any creation of individual accounts should be voluntary, and in addition to Social Security.
- The "Fair Tax" would save money for the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, and is therefore "not an outcome that will or should gain traction with the American people."
Thanks for playing, Mitt. Within your party, you'll be in 2012 what Joe Lieberman was in the Democratic field in 2004.
Now, I know what he's thinking: that all the other candidates will split the crazy/angry vote and he'll grab the dwindling remnant of the party that isn't completely bonkers and beside itself with rage. Hey, it was enough to get John McCain nominated in '08, right?
But I suspect that, as with the Democrats in '04, the frustration with the people in power will be so great that a contrarian candidate is just going to be roadkill. For Dems in '04, that meant the crypto-Republican Lieberman; for Republicans three years from now, it will mean a guy who has even a few ideas that aren't clinically insane.
And if Romney does somehow survive the primaries following the McCain path? He's going to have to put the barkingest lunatic in the party on the ticket to have any chance whatsoever of motivating the base in the fall.
Romney/Bachmann 2012?
David Bernstein of The Boston Phoenix has reviewed Mitt Romney's book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, which will hit the stores on March 2 -- and, well, a few bits of it do sound like red meat for the drooling masses in his party:
He is convinced (although I'm not sure why) that Barack Obama's open engagement with the world will plunge us from our perch -- what with Obama's acknowledgement of American mistakes, his willingness to negotiate with hostile nations, and his elevation of such concerns as "common interest of human beings," and "mutual respect" and "mutual interests" among nations.
Romney claims that this is already responsible for America's "flagging popular appeal" around the globe....
But the rest of the book, if the review is to be believed, seems like a political suicide note:
The ranting right-winger Romney we saw through much of the 2008 campaign is largely absent from this book. He makes only brief mention of abortion or homosexuals, or even the illegal-immigration issue with which he hammered John McCain. The momentary populist spasm that led him to vow to save every Michigan auto worker's job has been shunned; so has the weird enthusiasm for torture....
And, unlike most of his prominent Republican contemporaries, Romney doesn't once call anyone a socialist in this book. He barely even has a bad word for the media.
He wants to be the GOP nominee in three years. What the hell is he thinking?
But wait -- he says some things that are even more self-sabotaging:
- "Climate change is occurring," and is caused at least in part by human activity. "Global warming is a real and present danger."
- The 2008 TARP bank bailout was necessary and "did in fact keep our economy from total meltdown." ...
- The financial meltdown was not merely the fault of Democrats and poor people....
- A stimulus package "was called for" after the late-2008 economic downturn, and the Democrats' stimulus "will accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery."
- Privatizing Social Security would be a mistake; any creation of individual accounts should be voluntary, and in addition to Social Security.
- The "Fair Tax" would save money for the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, and is therefore "not an outcome that will or should gain traction with the American people."
Thanks for playing, Mitt. Within your party, you'll be in 2012 what Joe Lieberman was in the Democratic field in 2004.
Now, I know what he's thinking: that all the other candidates will split the crazy/angry vote and he'll grab the dwindling remnant of the party that isn't completely bonkers and beside itself with rage. Hey, it was enough to get John McCain nominated in '08, right?
But I suspect that, as with the Democrats in '04, the frustration with the people in power will be so great that a contrarian candidate is just going to be roadkill. For Dems in '04, that meant the crypto-Republican Lieberman; for Republicans three years from now, it will mean a guy who has even a few ideas that aren't clinically insane.
And if Romney does somehow survive the primaries following the McCain path? He's going to have to put the barkingest lunatic in the party on the ticket to have any chance whatsoever of motivating the base in the fall.
Romney/Bachmann 2012?
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