Newt makes up all sorts of bullshit and lives in some sort of bizarre fantasy world where you can go on vacation with food stamps, and the media lavishes him with praise and calls him an “ideas guy.”
Obama thinks things through, knows what he is talking about, and tells you the truth, and the media deride him as boring and professorial and lacking passion.
Phylllis
What’s your point?
Edited to add *+^#£ auto-correct.
carpeduum
….and voters like Cole are convinced by the media that Newt is the right guy for the job. Just like he was convinced that Bush was better than Gore and Kerry. Rinse repeat.
Conclusion….you can’t fix stupid. So what is your point?
Bulworth
Sounds accurate.
The Other Bob
Where have you been the last 11 years or so?
taylormattd
You realize this is no different from 1999, right?
ZOMG, THAT FUCKING AL GORE SIGHED IN THE DEBATE!!!!
geg6
If there is anything this country needs more of, it’s pols who are boring, professorial, and lacking passion. It’s the exciting, entrepreneurial, passionate assholes who have gotten us into this mess, after all.
walt
Gingrich flatters the fluffers to our plutocracy with big words. It helps them digest better.
Mark K.
Thats because Newt is a Republican and Obama is not. Thats all there is to it.
Always believe the opposite of an amoral liar like Newt or Rush. If he claims their is a liberal media, then in reality, there is a right-wind media.
EvolutionaryDesign
Oh, the times they aren’t-a-changin’
Cluttered Mind
It’s really pretty simple. McCain spelled this phenomenon out very clearly once, when he told his sycophants in the press something like “You are my base”. It’s just another symptom of our sick news media culture, much like how according to them it’s worse to call a liar a liar than to be a liar.
r€nato
@taylormattd: well, maybe I’m the only one around here who ‘gets’ why the sighing was a big deal. It simply reinforced impressions by those who weren’t particularly excited about either candidate (remember the meme at the time was, ‘not a dime’s worth of difference between Gore and Bush’), that Gore was an uptight, condescending prig.
Nobody likes the IT guy who never bothers to hide his exasperation with people who can’t troubleshoot their computer on their own.
Mike Goetz
To be fair, on Obama the media is helped along by liberal cranks.
EconWatcher
I’m becoming convinced that the US election is entirely in the hands of Angela Merkel.
If she can pull together a deal to save the Euro, the US economy seems to have enough positive momentum to show some improvement by the summer, and Obama will beat Mitt or not-Mitt.
If she can’t, we’re gonna have another big credit squeeze, and even Newt can win.
Cluttered Mind
@r€nato: I wish it weren’t necessary in our political culture to smile and politely respond to idiocy as though it were not idiocy if you don’t want to be treated as a condescending prig.
Gin & Tonic
@r€nato:
Hey..
butler
Well, technically they are correct about Newt. Guy has tons of “ideas”. They just happen to be really bad “ideas”.
Zandar
He’s black, you know.
maya
Obama needs better, catered, BBQs. Shirley, there must be a privatized firm that can do this?
bleh
I think the real story is that the media want a horse-race — or better yet, a food-fight — for the Republican nomination, and Newt is the last hope for that, so they’re fluffing him madly.
When it gets to the general, they’ll long since have trotted out new archetypes.
eric
Black, blackity, black, blacker than black, uppity black, uppity blackity black blacker than blackity black.
Seriously.
butler
But when my computer breaks down I’ll go with him, not the guy who doesn’t know his ass from a motherboard.
kindness
Yes, the MSM is in on the hit job. They want Republican rule…even the liberal NPR.
nepat
I don’t know. I’m feeling the Newt-mentum. Unethical, lying, hateful bigot has got to be equal to at least 3 percentage points off the unemployment rate in the overall 2012 political calculus.
James Hare
@r€nato:
Then fuck ’em. You don’t get pissed when your doctor lectures you about your eating/smoking/fucking habits, do you?
Us IT folks get the unglorified position of computer janitor, and we’re supposed to suffer through y’all shitting all over the place with a smile? Try that with a real janitor and see how quickly you get a broom stuffed up your ass.
Cluttered Mind
I really don’t know if any amount of media spin is going to be able to save Gingrich from the optics of a debate with Barack Obama. The old fat white southern good old boy talking down to the black POTUS might be appealing to a few people, but I try to have enough faith in the country as a whole to believe that most people will see it as appalling.
r€nato
@Cluttered Mind: there are ways to call people idiots without coming out and saying so explicitly.
Being right isn’t everything, it doesn’t grant one permission to stomp all over somebody else’s dignity. I don’t think that’s about our political culture, it’s about human nature. Nobody likes being condescended to, even when they are wrong about something. There’s also a lot of people out there who don’t have college degrees, who don’t read The Economist or The New Yorker, and they get one vote each just like you and I.
They don’t like being told that there’s something wrong with them for not belonging to the highly intelligent, well-read, world-wise, latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, Europe-vacationing class. That’s why Republicans mine them for votes with propaganda about ‘elitists’… and too often, we help them do their dirty work.
Gus
Yeah, because Newt’s ideas are stupid and the media is made up largely of idiots.
Linnaeus
@r€nato:
Furthermore, being wrong about something or not knowing how to do something does not necessarily make someone an “idiot”.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Zandar:
Yup. Every time the M$M blows, dogs across America cover their ears in agony.
I hear that dogs in Canada and Mexico even cringe.
khead
@James Hare:
I’ve learned to hide my eating/smoking/fucking habits.
Oh wait…. I’m not running for POTUS.
Also, I don’t want a broom stuffed up my ass.
Cluttered Mind
@r€nato: While I agree for the most part, there are certain instances where it’s inappropriate to not respond to something with scorn. I don’t remember the exact context of Al Gore’s sighing so I don’t want to use that as an example, but what about things like Michele Bachmann’s pseudo-science anti-vaccination comments? What about people who claim that public funds should be used for creationist museums that show humans and dinosaurs co-existing like that one in Kentucky? While it’s one thing to show respect for another’s dignity, sometimes when a person is expressing a really, really horrible or offensive idea, it’s completely appropriate to call them on it immediately and not allow it to be treated as a legitimate argument.
MarkJ
The village constantly mistakes competence for lack of charisma, and mistakes untrue soundbites for ideas.
The Bearded Blogger
Newt is a stupid man’s idea of what a smart man sounds like.
MSM people are fools.
ergo…
r€nato
@James Hare:
I do if he does so in a sneering, condescending manner.
One of Steve Jobs’ many gifts was understanding how fucked up was the (then-widespread) attitude in the computer business among certain people, that those who can’t handle a command line prompt, have no business turning on a computer.
Likewise, your ‘fuck ’em’ comment doesn’t fly when the business at hand is to win an election. You sound a bit like those purists on the right we here shit all over frequently, those who would prefer ideological purity to actually winning an election so that you can get shit done.
Cluttered Mind
@r€nato: Ideological purity might not win you every election, but everything that’s happened since 2006 should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that even if ideological purity can’t win you a majority in congress all the time, it sure as hell can prevent the other side from doing anything productive.
Soonergrunt
@Linnaeus: And yet an idiot is more likely to be wrong or not know something than one who is not an idiot.
The Bearded Blogger
@Cluttered Mind: If you really respect someone, or some group, you call out their bullshit or idiocy. The condensending everyone’s opinion needs to be respected false equivalency attitude only serves to dumb down debate, and is both condescending and hypocritical.
One of the reasons I like Bill Maher is he understands this.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@r€nato: From what I understand, that wasn’t Steve Jobs’ gift. His gift was making something and getting it sold. He was an ass.
Brachiator
My favorite is still, Newt is called by GOP ball washers “the smartest guy in the room,” and is supposedly the savior of Real American White People(tm)
Obama is said to “think of himself as the smartest guy in the room,” and is just uppity.
MikeBoyScout
Newt has very serious ideas. Paul Ryan told me so.
Cluttered Mind
@The Bearded Blogger: Yeah, I think you put it better than I did. One of my biggest pet peeves is how so many people believe that if Person A says White, and Person B says Black, the truth must be Grey. No, sometimes Person A might just be lying, and Person B is 100% right. The truth isn’t always in the middle.
Warmongerer
@r€nato:
And the neckbeards of the computer elite never forgave Jobs for making computer accessible to the unclean. He broke the priesthood.
Linnaeus
@Soonergrunt:
True. An idiot is often wrong, but not everyone who is wrong is an idiot.
@The Bearded Blogger:
Sure, call out things when they need to be called out. But how you do it depends a lot on context.
Cluttered Mind
@Brachiator: I’m pretty sure that’s because he’s black and there are often white people in the room with him so it naturally follows for these people that he’s being uppity when he believes he’s smarter.
Gustopher
Obama’s ideas are dour pesky things based in reality.
Newt’s ideas are free flowing and exciting, having no such limitations.
r€nato
@Cluttered Mind:
in the context of a nationally-televised presidential debate, where minutiae like McCain’s pacing and demeanor while Obama spoke are treated with as much seriousness as one’s words, how one responds is really, really important.
I’m not saying scorn is never appropriate. Gore’s sighing was a huge mistake.
Do you remember when Gerald Ford mistakenly insisted in his debate with Carter that the Soviet Union did not dominate Eastern Europe? He didn’t say it once and then realize that he’d misspoken; he insisted that he was right. Carter was certainly entitled to react with scorn, to gloat over how misinformed our appointed president was.
That’s not what he did. He let everyone else do that for him.
I’ll say it again; being right does not automatically entitle one to stomp all over someone else’s dignity, no matter how misinformed what the other person said may be.
r€nato
@Warmongerer: yep. I am pretty sure those folks and their descendants are the ones who suffer from pretty raging cases of Apple Derangement Syndrome.
kindness
I’m not worried about either Willard or Newt debating Obama.
Newt doesn’t even answer the question he’s given. He rambles on in 3 or 4 directions. That’s easy to nail to the wall and make him look like the idiot grifter he is. Willy, apparently Willy gets a little jumpy. Willy will recite what he’s memorized well but all you have to do is bring up how he said something different X years/months ago and he starts freaking out. Here again, easy to nail to the wall.
Rush will call Obama uppity after Barack tears either of these human pinatas a new butt hole and the ‘base’ (the racist base) will all agree and think that is all they need to beat Obama. But that scares most people. Most people see this and understand. I’m not saying Democrats don’t have their work cut out for them. But I do trust in our folk more than I give credit to theirs, even with all the Citizens United money they can stuff down the MSM’s throats.
r€nato
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): then your understanding is incorrect. He was a fairly gifted guy. Yes, he was a helluva salesman. Not just of things, but of his ideas. Sometimes he was wrong. And yes, he was an arrogant ass. I never nominated him for the Nice Guy Olympics.
He also, as I stated, vigorously fought the notion that existed at the time that computers were only for those who could write computer programs or had a thorough understanding of DOS. He understood that he wanted to sell computers, lots of them – and so they had to be made friendly and accessible to the wide public. Even to housewives who’d never written a line of BASIC.
That we do not recall today that that’s how things were back then, shows how much that paradigm was changed thanks to Apple and Jobs.
geg6
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Yes, directly from people who knew him, he was a gigantic asshole who, if there was an asshole Olympics, would get the gold medal while Newt was just an also-ran. I really don’t think we need to take pointers from some alternate universe Steve Jobs.
jl
I agree with other commenters, this post is weak trolling by Cole.
Newt is a hyperborean, an overman, and world historical figure, who makes history, while all others simply watch. Newt feels no accountability to anything or anyone.
Even Bachmann, Perry, and even Cain feel weak tingles of responsibility when they are called on their particularly egregious nonsense and make some attempts to respond. But what a downer that is for our worthless national affairs reporters and pundits, for then they might have to look stuff up and do some work, and maybe think, since the candidate has gone through some sort of motion of doing the same.
They don’t have to worry about anything like that from Newt. He will launch into more outrageous BS in response, or launch into meaningless futurist or corporate consulting innovation speak. No media people have to do any work to riff off anything Newt does.
Newt’s a win win for our current media VSPers.
Cluttered Mind
@r€nato: Yeah, I suppose context always matters. Gore didn’t do himself any favors with that sigh, but in the broader context of the 2000 campaign I’d argue that the media would have continued to go with that particular narrative regardless of what Gore actually did say or do. Remember that they misquoted him several times in order to manufacture more examples of Gore being arrogant or Gore exaggerating his accomplishments. He never actually did say that he invented the internet or that he discovered that canal or whatever it was they claimed he said. That didn’t stop it from being reported as fact that he did.
Edited to add: I just realized that my post could be interpreted as attempting to move the goalposts of the argument so I just wanted to say clearly that I agree that Gore’s sigh was a misstep in the context of a nationally broadcasted presidential debate.
RareSanity
John Cole @ top:
Discussing the facts, and putting forth well thought out solutions, to the issues that face our country, don’t get good ratings John.
You know that…
The freak show, that is the lead up to the GOP primary, now THAT gets eyeballs to the screen!
It’s like The Jerry Springer Show. Everyone agrees that it is disgusting and vile and that they don’t personally watch it. However, the ratings say a whole lot of someone’s ARE watching it…
ericblair
@Cluttered Mind:
Well, sure, but it’s a lot easier to assume that than actually understanding the arguments and the actual reality of the situation. It’s basic bad parenting: you don’t care that one kid punched the other in the nose and the other is blameless, you just want them both to shut up and go away.
Cluttered Mind
@ericblair: That’s unfortunately true. It also explains why there is no longer any political disadvantage to lying about anything and everything, if indeed there ever was one to begin with.
r€nato
@Cluttered Mind: I totally agree about the media in 2000. I can’t tell you how many times I had that “AL GORE SAID HE INVENTED THE INTERNET!” crap shoved in my face. It was infuriating. And no matter how hard I tried, I was never able to convince a single wingnut scumsucking asshole that they were wrong. The documented, actual words that he said were insufficient to convince even one of these cretins that they’d been lied to.
Warmongerer
@geg6:
Asshole yes. But he understood the importance of design and usability for computers. In contrast, the neckbeard elite deride such concepts and refuse to see them as being even remotely valuable in any way.
r€nato
@geg6: He was a gigantic asshole who happened to be spectacularly right a lot of the time, and he didn’t hesitate to tell people how right he was and how fucking wrong they were.
Of course, he wasn’t running for president either. Which illustrates my point. He would have been a fucking disaster of galactic proportions in politics, even though he could have done a much better job of running the clown show than anybody we have had the chance to vote for in our entire lifetimes.
r€nato
@Warmongerer: here, here.
Cluttered Mind
@r€nato: The worst part of it to me is that what he actually said was perfectly legitimate. He was taking credit for doing his part in congress to secure funding what eventually led to the internet. He deserves credit for that, and he actually did play an important role in the creation of the internet. Totally infuriating what was done to him, and I have had similar experiences trying to convince people that they were lied to about that. Nothing worked for me, either.
Sasha
@EconWatcher:
And even Palin, which would lead to the GOP base demanding even more hardline orthodoxy from it’s nominee. (“We don’t need ‘electable’ in a can’t-lose election — we need purity!”)
r€nato
@James Hare:
you – and the janitor – might want to reflect on the fact that if people didn’t shit all over the place, you might not have a job.
r€nato
@Cluttered Mind: yes, what he said was truthful and not exaggerated one bit.
Easy for me to second-guess 11 years on, but I can’t help but think that the fact this meme was allowed to take hold, reflects on the general nature of his weak-ass campaign which spent too much time (meaning, any at all) apologizing for being Clinton’s VP and generally playing into exactly what the GOP wanted him to do.
g
@r€nato:
But here the dynamic will be different. Newt is the condescendning windbag here. And Newt slams the press as well. They aren’t going to give him the pass they gave McCain, who lavished them with barbecues, and that they gave Bush, who made up nicknames for them.
Obama is a pretty nice, relaxed guy in person with a great open smile. He’s even a nice guy when he talks to jerks like Bill O’Reilly. When he’s “professorial” and stern it’s at the lectern, and it’s Congress he’s talking to not the American people or TV personalities.
Gingrich plays the pompous know-it-all professor when he’s talking with journalists, and has an egotist’s need to show everyone he’s the smartest man in the room. The pundits might like him, at least at first, but the press who interacts with him on a regular basis is going to despise him.
Cluttered Mind
@r€nato: Yeah, I don’t think there’s anyone who would argue that Gore’s campaign wasn’t a disaster. The media sure didn’t make things any easier on him, though. And it is also important to remember that there’s a very real possibility that despite all that happened Gore actually did win the election, even though he wasn’t allowed to take the presidency thanks to GOP election fraud in Florida and a corrupt Supreme Court.
Zifnab
@Warmongerer:
He didn’t make computers accessible. He made them inaccessible. That’s why you had to wait six years for a damn Mac/OS port of anything you could possible want to install.
Jobs tried to corner the computer market by flooding it with electric bricks. Anyone who knew two shits about how a computer worked, took a long look at the straight-jacket they were being asked to climb into, and said “Fuck No!”
Then, when hordes of idiot consumers started running around to their friends, asking them to fix the opaque pieces of plastic crap Jobs had been doling out for ten years, the damn finally broke when it became apparent that “Oh shit, maybe it would be better to just change out a $50 stick of memory rather than replacing a $2000 desktop”.
But to change out a stick of RAM, you have to be a god damn wizard, flying in on a magic dragon and shooting lightning bolts out your ass. So all the IT and software guys took shit for being too damn smart while Jobs got shitcanned for being a bad businessman. And yet ten years later, Jobs was back with the exact same idiot-suckering con-game. And if the damn hadn’t burst on IT guys figuring out how to stick Windows on overpriced Apple hardware, Jobs would have been out on his ass again before you could say iWishThisWasCompatible.
The IT priesthood bailed Jobs’s ass out by hacking his hardware. Now shit actually runs on Apple computers, despite the damnedest attempts to prevent it from doing so. Somehow the “priesthood” still takes shit for knowing what its shit is, but we bare the burden because we’re tough, we’re smart, and when we get home we’re going to be playing Skyrim on a modded out overclocked home-built rig that would bring tears to a real computer guy’s eyes.
So you can just take your shiny, overpriced, art deco, coffee-house piece of crap and iSuckit. “Priesthood”. :-p
slag
@Zifnab: For the most part, I’m a huge fan of Apple’s hardware. Just sayin.
Zandar
Newt has already won every debate with President Obama in the minds of the faithful, you know.
It doesn’t matter to them what he does.
It will however matter to the swing voters.
Cluttered Mind
@Zifnab: I think it’s pretty funny that anyone who supports Apple would use the term “Priesthood” in a derogatory way to describe their opponents, in light of that study that shows that the brains of Apple fanbois get stimulated in the same way when they think about Apple that devout religious people’s brains do when they think about God.
EconWatcher
I’m still somewhat worried about Newt if the economy gets much worse. But when you think about it, he really is the perfect opponent for Obama.
Obama is preternatually cool (what is his standing pulse rate–6 beats a minute?). He can drive even an even-keeled person like Hillary to get mad and make stupid mistakes because he seems so unreachable and above the fray.
What would happen to someone with a bloated ego, thin skin, and poor impulse control, like Newt?
slag
@Cluttered Mind: Actually this is true. I pray to my slim, self-contained, magnetically connected power plug every night before I go to bed.
Mark K.
Nope
You all know that if you could somehow hypnotize these pundits or any Republican and tell them Newt is a 3x married lobbyist liar Democrat and Obama is a happily married self-made man Republican: they would hate Newts guts and start chiseling Obamas face on Mt. Rushmore at once.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@James Hare: “Us IT folks get the unglorified position of computer janitor, and we’re supposed to suffer through y’all shitting all over the place with a smile?”
Yes. Without those fuckups you would have less work to do. those fuckups create jobs!
Smile and collect a paycheck.
Cluttered Mind
@slag: Can’t say I blame you, that plug probably did more to improve your quality of life than an invisible sky man ever did. Preach on!
boss bitch
@g:
This is exactly right. Obama hasn’t done the Al Gore sigh. He can, however, cut a mofo down a notch when you least expect it.
Mnemosyne
@Zifnab:
Huh? I was able to change the memory on my Apple Performa just by popping it open, removing the old memory, inserting the new memory, and closing it up. I was even able to do it on my Mac Classic with no trouble, though I had to get the strange $10 screwdriver to open the case.
“You can’t change the memory in an Apple!” is one of those weird urban myths that PC people seem to cling to. If a technological idiot like me could do it and you couldn’t, maybe you were overthinking it.
slag
@Cluttered Mind: Two finger track pad scrolling. I was a doubter at first, but Steven Paul Tapdancing Jobs, I have seen the light!
boss bitch
@EconWatcher:
Michelle Obama once said that his calm demeanor would set her off even more during their arguments.
AA+ Bonds
Don’t even bother trying to play a nuanced explanation of food stamps against Young Bucks A-Strappin’. Won’t work, too complicated.
Use Rove Strategy: attack their strengths.
Republicans believe that Newt Gingrich is Big Time Smarts Guy, college professor intellectual, ready to tell you about Toffler’s Third Wave and how technology is going to give us Dow 100,000 a couple months after we defund all regulatory agencies.
But what if Newt Gingrich is so stupid and senile that he doesn’t understand How Does Card Swipe Work? What if poor old Newt thinks everything with a magnetic strip is a credit card, because he’s just that old and out of touch?
“You use a debit card, don’t ya? Can you believe that Newt doesn’t know those exist? I mean, those people on food stamps are moochers but I just can’t support a guy who’s a decade behind the times on technology.”
Then, we’re cookin’. All of a sudden, we can attack Newt’s statement on food stamps without worrying if our viewers/listeners even support or understand food stamps.
AA+ Bonds
Also: listening to Product Consumer talk about how Company is better than Company because of the evil of Other Product Consumer and the virtue of Bitch Shit Man-Baby CEO, that’s like listening to a man made of sheet metal roll around in a bath of broken Coke bottles while shrieking that he can JUST TELL they’re not Pepsi
El Cid
I have long been disgusted at how Newt’s bullshit has been treated as statesmanlike erudition.
Cluttered Mind
@AA+ Bonds: Fucking magnetic strips, how do they work?
AA+ Bonds
I discovered today that Republicans have become so baseline insane in their views that if I pretend to be a Ron Pauler as I slag on their guy, it actually makes them feel guilty and uncomfortable defending their favorite 2012 candidate against personal slander.
They all now see Ron Paul as the real Republican, the China White of their party, and fear their weak natures won’t let them ride the wave. They don’t want to admit they ain’t real. I should’ve seen this coming, considering every Fox News and Fox Nation thread about pot is about 99% pro-legalization.
Food for thought. If you want to play purist and sow doubt, swear up and down that the Ron Paul Revolution is real. He’s already hitting Newt for us, we might as well repay him.
Hill Dweller
@boss bitch:
I can’t remember which debate, but McCain had been repeatedly calling Obama irresponsible for something to do with national security, but he just kept smiling. McCain kept it up, until Obama finally said something along the lines of ‘I’m not the one that joked about bombing Iran’. What little bit of color there was in McCain’s face disappeared as quickly as his chances of being President.
AA+ Bonds
@Cluttered Mind:
Exactly.
zmullls
@butler:
RTFM
The Other Chuck
@Mnemosyne:
A Performa? Not exactly on the bleeding edge, are we?
But yeah, installing RAM in an iMac is actually just a matter of unscrewing a small panel on the bottom and sliding it in. No harder than on the average laptop.
Brachiator
@Zifnab:
You’re joking, right?
bemused
The Newt supporters living in a fantasy world who have pushed up Newt’s percentage points scare me. Unfathomable.
birthmarker
Down here we say, “He has more notions than a dog has fleas.” That’s exactly how I think of Newt.
Soonergrunt
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
That’s what I do.
“Oh, I’ve seen it before. It’s easy to do.” “No worries. I can get that working in a moment”
I laugh my ass off about them in my office.
Soonergrunt
@Hill Dweller: He was going after Obama saying that he would bomb Pakistan or send raids into Pakistan if he thought it was in the interests of the US to do so, especially with respect to Al Quaeda hiding there.
Scamp Dog
The story going around Congress in the ’90s was that there was a large room, stuffed full of filing cabinets labeled “Newt’s Ideas”. Also in the room, on a table, was a thin folder labeled “Newt’s Good Ideas”.
Boots Day
Gingrich is the intellectual of the GOP field in the same way that Moe was the intellectual of the Stooges.
I wish I had said that, but it was actually Andy Borowitz.
pseudonymous in nc
Silly John: don’t you know that suggesting the US might, say, benefit from infrastructure investment and universal healthcare is “fanciful” and “fantastical”, while child janitors and sharks with fricking laser beams patrolling the border are “bold” and “creative”.
kay
Honestly, I just think there’s a romanicized version of life that says a genius with brilliant ideas will have an easy answer.
No one will have to work hard, or know anything specific, we’ll just have an idea factory.
I actually think it stems from 30 years of elevating CEO’s and managers and treating people who actually do the work that the ‘idea’persom
taylormattd
@r€nato: The problem is it didn’t happen at all.
For people that actually watched the debates in real time, Al Gore won them. ALL of them. The polls showed it. They like him better than Bush, they liked his debate performance better than Bush. All the snap polls showed this.
But guess who didn’t like Gore? The media. They hated him. They literally booed him in the media room, and then wrote numerous false articles about how everyone would hate Gore’s performace, in the face of polls showing the opposite. Only after several weeks of pounding by the democrat-hating media did polls start saying Gore lost the debates, and he was too out of touch and shit.
Spectre
Your premise is flawed. Obama doesn’t tell the truth.
Insomniac
@Spectre: Ah. An eleventh hour troll. Where are your examples, then? Idiot.
pseudonymous in nc
Some anecdata: I knew a bunch of people who watched the debates in the small hours of the morning in Europe, where they were working for a few months. When they flew back to the US, they couldn’t believe the conventional wisdom that had been generated by the Gore-hating media whores. And they never gave a shit about the sighing, because they weren’t told by those whores that it was Important.
moderateindy
@Scamp Dog:
Actually, that came from Newt’s staff. As a joke they supposedly actually had a very large box that was labeled “Newt’s ideas”, and then a shoebox that was labeled “Newt’s good ideas”. Nobody knows you better than the folks that work for you.
Obama’s people should be jumping on Newt’s ridiculous have the kids be the school’s janitor idea. They should point out that the janitor’s job in a school usually provides a liveable wage for an adult and their family. Also, janitors tend to live in the community where they work. After all wouldn’t that bethe kind of an adult that provides the kids,which he supposedly is concerned have no examples of a work ethic, an example of someone that has a job?
Perhaps they might also compare Newt to the businessman that decides to save money by shipping his jobs to a place that will have kids do the work more cheaply. Just another case of the modern Republican party trying to turn the USA into a third world hovel, or worse yet; Alabama.
Pat In Massachusetts
I don’t think Obama is the most truthful guy on the block, but I’ll agree with the rest of the post.
sparky
well yeah, but that’s because Newt is new, sorta. the only obligation is to flog “NEW” endlessly. it’s more reflexive than ideological: how else are you going to attract viewers? keep in mind that when Obama was new, he benefited hugely from a tsunami of favorable press about his being the new guy.
edit: i could take the bait about Obama, but don’t feel like it today. next time for sure.