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Underrated humorist Dave Weigel at Slate wrapped up his coverage of T-Paw’s pining-for-the-fjords campaign with “the statements from Pawlenty’s rivals, bidding him farewell“. All following emphases & shorters mine:
Bachmann: This morning I spoke with Governor Pawlenty to express my respect and admiration for him, and to wish him and his family well. Running for the presidency requires enormous self-sacrifice. Governor Pawlenty brought an important voice and ideas to the campaign, and he served the people of Minnesota and our country well. Our party and our country are better as a result of his service and commitment.
Shorter: How blessed are we true believers that God has called his strong handmaiden, St. Michele, to make that enormous self-sacrifice… rather than some whiny little so-last-week ex-guv!
Romney: Tim Pawlenty and his entire team ran an honorable campaign. I admire his accomplishments as a two term Governor with a record of results for his state. I consider him a friend and I know he has a bright future ahead of him as a leader in the Republican Party.
Shorter: You know who else was a governor with a record of results? No, not Hitler — ME.
Huntsman: Tim Pawlenty is an accomplished Governor, a proud conservative, and someone of tremendous character. Our families became close while we were serving together as governors and we are honored to call the Pawlentys dear friends. I know this wasn’t an easy decision for Tim and Mary, and I wish them nothing but the best. Tim should be proud that he brought to this race ambitious solutions to turn around our nation’s economy and to tackle debt and spending. I hope that all of his supporters continue to stay engaged in this defining election and work with us to ensure that our party wins in November.
Shorter: I hope that by 2016, you guys will have gotten over your fascination with no-hoper novelty candidates and be looking for someone who might actually be able to win an election for the Republicans.
Rick Perry: Tim Pawlenty is a good friend and colleague who I have worked closely with over the years, including visiting our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a governor, Tim stuck to conservative principles despite leading a blue state like Minnesota. He and Mary are true patriots who are committed to our country, and ran an honorable campaign that reflected their integrity. Gov. Pawlenty’s common-sense conservative voice will remain prominent and influential as we work to beat President Obama in 2012 and get America working again.
Shorter: Buzzword BINGO — yee haw!
Johnson: Governor Pawlenty’s decision to end his campaign is his to make, and I respect that decision. He and his many supporters have put forth a great effort, and should be applauded for it. As Republicans survey a new list of candidates today, including the departure of a candidate who is credible, experienced and who had a real record to run on, it is appropriate to question the inflated role of an event like the Ames Straw Poll in the process. That a pay-to-play gathering in Iowa six months before the first real ballots are cast can be such a qualifying — or disqualifying — event is something the media and tens of millions of Republican voters need to think about. A lot of voices have not been heard yet, and it is far too early for the ‘system’ to be picking winners and losers. If there is a message from Ames, it is that this race is wide open and that the vast majority of Republicans and Independents are still looking for the candidate who can win the White House in 2012.
Shorter: Do you slack-jawed novelty-seekers and media enablers have any idea how embarrassing you are to us precious few smart people stuck with the “Republican” label?
Yutsano
Is it just me or is Johnson basically surrendering right there?
Joseph Nobles
Talk about readership capture.
Comrade Kevin
Sorry, but Weigel is not underrated at anything
Spaghetti Lee
As a governor, Tim stuck to conservative principles despite leading a blue state like Minnesota.
Way to win over the independents, Ricky.
JGabriel
Romney:
Longer Shorter Romney: When I’m presidentin’, maybe I’ll give Rience Priebus’s job to Tim. I can’t pronounce that guy’s name anyway.
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JGabriel
Huntsman:
Shorter Huntsman: We swapped wives.
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JGabriel
Perry:
Shorter Perry: You know who else is from Minnesota? Make ya wonder if she’s a real conservative.
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JGabriel
Weigel:
Shorter Random Bystander: I hear voices in my head. I support Michele Bachmann because I think it’s time everyone else heard them too.
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Odie Hugh Manatee
While it’s hilarious to laugh at the clown car that the Republicans pilot, it’s pretty depressing to think that one-half of our political two-party system is fucking insane. It’s more depressing that one ‘side’ of this country hates the other side with a violent passion.
I really think that things are going to get much worse before there is a chance for things to get better. Much like a drunk who can’t admit that they have a problem, we are probably going to have to hit rock bottom before we have a real chance to change things.
That is if there is anything left to rebuild ourselves with. Until then, I think we will continue on our downward spiral. This isn’t something that any president could lead us out of because one person can’t be expected to fix what’s wrong with the mess we are in.
Much of our government has sold out to the highest bidder and we are nothing but bargaining chips to be spent in the trade. The wealthy run the show and like it or not, we’re all stuck on the ride with them.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Odie Hugh Manatee: It was the two bolts holding the shifter column to the linkage.
JenJen
And awaaaaaaaay we go!!
Cincinnati Enquirer: Bomb squad called to John Boehner’s West Chester Office
Cute that the under-utilized West Chester Police got to blow some shit up, though. Funny how the “story” notes that only papers were enclosed within the briefcases, but the headline doesn’t. Also funny that the “story” is certain to mention “Boehner’s Cincinnati-Dayton Road office has been the scene of several protests in recent weeks.” Living in Cincinnati has its benefits but good grief, can we get some actual reporters up in here?
harlana
@Odie Hugh Manatee: I don’t want to live out the rest of my life in times like these. It’s so humiliating after working most of my adult life, believing I would be rewarded somehow, in the end. I want to go back to the 90’s when the middle class was thriving and I was young and beautiful and had no trouble landing a job. The outlook is bleak. I thought I’d be able to retire one day, but as you say, things will get much worse before they get better. Still, I maintain hope, for what it’s worth.
JGabriel
Really? I always think of the Cincinnati region as that little bit of Indiana and Kentucky in Ohio — also as the reason OH ends up in the GOP column so often in presidential elections.
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Dennis SGMM
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
The people of that one side of this country have wholly committed themselves to myths. They make shit up and then get angry about it (Young bucks with their t-bones) or they make shit up and get happy about it (If I pray real hard I’ll go to that big home in the sky). They’re fact-averse because the world is easier for them if they just riff off of a handful of basic “truths.” No president can fix that. Me? I think that it’s time to consider dissolving the Union and letting them go their own way. Maybe a couple of decades of FAIL will snap them out of it – or not.
harlana
But what did Thaddeus McCotter have to say??
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Dennis SGMM: Except it’s not geographical.
harlana
I saw some of Perry’s announcement in Charleston and it reminded me of a rabid dog who can speak better than Bush. He was whipping up the hate pretty good there.
JGabriel
Bomb squad called to John Boehner’s West Chester Office via @JenJen:
Two lawyers and a very pissed off realtor were seen complaining to police that they had “just gone to the lobby news stand for coffee while waiting for the elevator and how the hell are we supposed to close on our mortgages now?!”
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JenJen
@JGabriel: Hahahaha! A real reporter would be all over that angle of the story. Exactly whose briefcases got blown the fuck up, anyway?
Re: your earlier comment about Cincinnati, just remember, it’s a big city (according to the 2010 Marxist Anti-Democratic Nazi Census, now the largest city in Ohio, metro area included), but the suburbs and rural areas are always making us look bad. If you just look at the city, it’s pretty progressive, and progressing steadily.
JGabriel
@Dennis SGMM:
We’d end up in never-ending wars with them over territory.
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harlana
@JGabriel: Priceless!, Although use of the word “detonate” in the article is totally inappropriate.
BJ gods, can we get a clip of Herman Cain singing gospel with Huckabee strumming his bass in Iowa? It’s worth a peek.
Dennis SGMM
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
True, here in laid back, hippy-ridden California you can drive thirty miles inland from almost any point on the coast and you’re in Children of the Corn territory. I’d still posit that the old CSA would be a good starting point for dissolution of the Union. Hopefully, most of the god botherers and other buggers would emigrate to be among their fellow believers.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Dennis SGMM: We’ll fight to the death in the People’s Republic of Athens!
Dennis SGMM
@JGabriel:
Maybe. I’m more inclined to believe that it would play out more along the lines of Germany after the creation of the Berlin wall.
JGabriel
Dennis SGMM:
Nah gonna happen. They’d demand all of the US for themselves, and that the libtards all move to Canada, Russia, or North Korea if they don’t like it!
Which, come to think of it, is pretty much like the way it is now.
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Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@JGabriel: Or Jamaica, mon.
JenJen
@JGabriel: Just to be clear, West Chester (where the “bomb scare OMG BBQ WTF”) isn’t even in Hamilton County, which is really Cincinnati as we know it. Hamilton County went big for Obama in 2008, and Clinton in 1996. Super-close in 2000 but ultimately went for Dubya. 2004 was Dubya all the way, but you gotta admit we rebounded nicely a mere four years later. Yes, I realize this part of the state plays the role of Lucy-with-the-football to the rest of the state, something we progressives down here are working tirelessly to correct. Because it’s fucking embarrassing.
– JenJen, fighting Cincinnati stereotypes since at least the mid-90’s
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
I caught that post in the other thread and responded but you must have missed it (the thread was pretty much dead when I returned). Either way, excellent! There’s nothing like a cheap and easy fix to keep things running right and make you happy.
Did you just tighten them or did you put some blue loctite on the threads before tightening. I would really recommend the loctite because shifters take a lot of abuse and they are subjected to lots of vibration and torque.
May it live long and shift well. :)
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@JenJen: You can’t defend a place that put chili on pasta!
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Odie Hugh Manatee: You know I though about that. There is not a great deal of clearance because of the primitive way I used a clod chisel to carve out that hole 23 years ago. I’m going to go back and do that. Thanks for the jolt.
JenJen
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it!!
Fucking YUM. Whenever I’m out of town for an extended period of time, I miss Cincy Chili so bad, I hit my favorite chili parlor on the way home from the airport.
ETA: Also too, GOETTA. I, for one, celebrate any American city with its very own cuisine. Damn few left.
JGabriel
JenJen, fighting Cincinnati stereotypes since at least the mid-90’s:
Heh. All I know is … there’s a reason for that stereotype. Whenever I looked at a district-level electoral map of OH, like, oh say, 2000’s or 2004’s map, I used to think, “Goddammit, if we could just rearrange Ohio’s border to push Cincinnati into IN or KY, we’d have won.”
(/playful teasing — keep fighting the good fight, ‘cuz you clearly had some success in 2008)
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Odie Hugh Manatee
@harlana:
Retire? Hahahahaha. My wife and I fully expect to work until the day we drop. Just like Galt would want us to. Once we are useless to anyone, we go away. After all, what good are we to the rich at that point? They have no use for us once they have milked us for all we are worth.
We are little more than annoying cattle to them, that’s all.
@Dennis SGMM:
What world they inhabit really doesn’t matter, they don’t want us in it. I may not like them and I may vehemently disagree with them, but like it or not, they are my fellow citizens so I can’t hate them. I know that they would prefer me dead or just gone from ‘their’ country, but that doesn’t change anything.
They can hate all they want but I can’t do the same. Maybe that’s why we are losing; we’re too fucking thoughtful and compassionate while they are incapable of thought or compassion. Even if every single person they hated would just disappear today, they will not stop hating.
They would just turn the hate onto themselves and continue the divisions so they can get their hate on.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
You won’t regret it, I guarantee it. :)
I have every color of loctite on hand and use the appropriate type on just about every mechanical job I do, especially in vibration-prone environments.
It’s a good mechanics best friend. One of many.
JGabriel
@JenJen:
One could argue that’s because there’s no good way to miss it, but not me — because chili & Mexican food are two of the very few cuisines NYC does NOT do well*. So I’m in no position to be judgemental about Cincy’s chili.
(*Or so people from the West Coast and Southwest always tell me.)
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f_space_that
Perry is Randall Flagg.
Fulcanelli
Rick “Palin with a p*nis” Perry:
After that statement it’s pretty obvious Perry is intent on broadcating on the same frequency as Snowbilly Spice and wants to steal her doodz while she dawdles and decides whether or not to run.
Palin better hurry up… The pods are beginning to twitch and glow and they’re facing south this time.
FSM help us.
gnomedad
@Dennis SGMM:
In a nutshell.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Anne Laurie continues to display an impeccable taste in music.
jayjaybear
@Dennis SGMM: It would have to be more along the lines of what happened back at the birth of India and Pakistan as separate countries (population exchanges). Unfortunately, it would probably end up the same way, too, with the two components perpetually at each others’ throats. Personally, I’d have no problem seeing a division like the kind envisioned in a particular political cartoon after the 2004 election…a northern UCAS (United Canadian and American States) and a southern Jesusland. But then I already live in a state that would end up going with the former.
PurpleGirl
@JenJen: Re: Goetta — It looks like scrapple. Which I love and have a hard time finding in NYC.
Derf
That douche bag Libertarian sympathizing quote at the end was cute.
I love how you spewmasters like to throw in your little libertarian curious tendencies now and again.
Why no comment on Johnsons wish to eliminate child labour and civil rights laws?
Paul in KY
@JGabriel: You seem to have Cinncinatti pegged pretty well ;-)
Suzan
Rosanne Cash’s version of Runaway Train is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever. Glad you posted Stewart’s version too if for no other reason than to demonstrate how much better hers is. And his is not half bad.
Sentient Puddle
@JGabriel:
Not that I’m one who enjoys this cuisine enough to know, but when I get family from New Mexico visiting me in Texas, they say that the Texans can’t do this shit well either.
VOR
Is “Reagan Republican” now the new name for moderate? Interesting article in Pawlenty’s home-state St. Paul Pioneer Press. http://www.twincities.com/ci_18682100?source=email
“”In many ways, Pawlenty was doomed with timing on lots of scores,” said David Schultz, who teaches political science at Hamline University in St. Paul. First, he’s a Reagan Republican in a party that’s been remade in the image of Sarah Palin, Schultz said. “
JGabriel
VOR:
Jeepers.
T. Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush I.
Given that list, I don’t think it’s controversial to identify Reagan as the most extreme right-wing president of the 20th Century.
And now Reagan is the paradigm of moderate? I feel nauseous.
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Tehanu
WTF? Uh … I thought the biggest “result” of his governorship was when that bridge collapsed and killed a bunch of people. In Rethuglican World, that’s a feature not a bug?
jeff
Which is a population of ZERO. You can be smart or you can be
slimeRepublican, but you can’t be both. Not any more.jeff
@Tehanu:
Yes, because gubmint is ALWAYS the enemy, no matter what!
Just read “League of Ordinary Gentlemen”, a blog that USED to be sane.