Rich Lowry at K-Lo’s Christmas Crib of Despair:
Speaking of discontent with the Republican field, I talked the other day to a pretty prominent conservative officeholder who’s constantly been discussing with people around the country the possibility of a new entrant or a push to draft someone. But who? One name he mentioned is Bobby Jindal, who is extremely knowledge, a favorite of conservatives, and has executive experience. One big problem: Jindal is with Perry–literally. Not only has he endorsed him, he’s been campaigning with him. For a Jindal scenario to work, Perry would have to collapse and Jindal turn around and immediately express interest in rising from his friend’s ashes. This officeholder also says that the deadline for ballot access in a lot of states is about two weeks after Iowa, meaning that a drafted candidate would probably have to use some other candidate’s ballot line as a proxy or go with a write-in. All of this sounds quite far-fetched. The other alternative for a new candidate is a convention where no one has a majority of delegates. That also is far-fetched, but not impossible as Brian demonstrated in his “Getting to Brokered” piece. It’s hard to argue, though, with the bottom line of this conservative: In an election with enormous consequences for the future of our country, “we don’t have our A team on the field.”
Apparently all the Republicans need is their own dark-skinned person who is extremely knowledge, and the next election is in the bag.
Southern Beale
Oh yes, PLEASE run Bobby Jindal. PRETTY PLEASE. That guy who after the BP oil spill used his extremely knowledge to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on environmentally damaging berms that didn’t do jack shit to stop the oil from washing ashore.
The guy who gave the Republican Party response to Obama’s first SOTU and he spoke to the nation like we were all a bunch of 3rd graders, and who also referred to himself as his parents’ “anchor baby.”
Yes he would be a BRILLIANT choice. Run Bobby Run!
Poor dears. They think their problem is their candidates? It’s not. It’s their ideology.
debit
@Southern Beale:
I remember Chris Matthews’ mic being live and before Jindal even spoke, he groaned out, “Oh god!” He knew it would be a disaster in a half a second.
Dream On
Jeb time. You can feel it!
Irving
… Bobby Jindal is “with” Rick Perry, “literally”? What, in a Biblical sense?
Southern Beale
A friend of mine swears that Obama cut a secret deal with the Republican Party. The deal was Obama would go along with some Republican shit like tax cuts for millionaires and cutting Medicare, and the Republicans wouldn’t run a viable candidate.
But really, who do they have? Jeb isn’t running for a reason: Bush poisoned that family tree. The Tea Party has cut the GOP in two. They’ve got nuthin’ and no one. Now a candidate has to be so extreme to win a primary that they’ve ruined their chances for winning the general. The Republican Party is a fringe, extreme political movement. Until the GOP backs away from the cliff, I don’t see their situation improving.
dmsilev
It’s going to be downright hilarious watching these folks go full-on Ministry Of Truth in their support of Romney if/when he wins the nomination.
We support Romney. We have always supported Romney.
c u n d gulag
A team?
What, pray tell, A team?
You gave us a C+ President for 8 years.
Or, rather, his Daddies and his Uncle Ronnies SCOTUS did for the first 4, and then reversible voting machines with no paper trail, for the last 4.
You now have fallen even further.
You have your D team out there, because you’re a morally bankrupt party full of F’s, and those D’s, are the best of the really sorry lot that were willing to run against President Obama.
You’d think a party that hated our first black President as much as they have for the last 3 years, would have thought this through a little more.
Oh, yeah, that’s right – they DID!
And I echo Southern Beale above – yes, please give us the gift that is another of your very own brown clowns – Bobby Jindal.
Because running Herman Cain wasn’t already funny enough.
SiubhanDuinne
One of the commenters over there was creaming himself speculating that Perry would emerge victorious and choose Volcano Monitors as his running mate.
Hahahahaha.
(Also, too, I think we need a new rotating tag saying “This Blog is Extremely Knowledge.”)
dmsilev
@Southern Beale: The correct answer is that Barack Obama’s superpower is that he induces electoral opponents to self-destruct. A history:
* Obama’s primary opponent in his State Senate race, the incumbent in fact, failed to turn in enough signatures on their renominating petition.
* After his first opponent in the IL Sen race developed an …unusual sex scandal, the state GOP decided to import Alan Keyes.
* Hillary Clinton decided to listen to Mark Penn
* Sarah Palin
I rest my case.
Wag
Jeb-mentum? I doubt it. America is Bushed out.
low-tech cyclist
What c u n d gulag said – this is a party without an A team, and for good reason: the GOP of 2011 makes GWB seem sane and moderate by comparison.
When the national press is reporting on the state of politics in general, they can hide this fact, but when people look at the actual proposals of specific candidates, the lunacy is hard to ignore.
Hell, this crew didn’t have an A team in 2008; McCain, Romney, Huckabee, and Rudy 9-11 were already a B team without an A team.
This year’s crop is a C team without an A or B team. If Paul Ryan or Bobby Jindal or John Thune were running, they’d look just as bad as the rest of this crew.
Amir Khalid
Did NRO’s Christmas celebrations include laying off the copy editors?
Baud
Anyone good enough to be on the GOP A-Team is smart enough to wait until 2016.
balconesfault
And yet … the GOP could dig deep into their ranks, and suddenly decide to nominate Duke Cunningham or Joe “You Lie” Wilson or Tom Delay to be President … and at a minimum 40% of the American voters would pull the Republican lever in 2012.
We’re that screwed up.
JPL
Run Sarah run!
jrg
LULZ. A “knowledgeable” brown guy. Try selling that to your base.
What a bunch of clowns. Then spend the last decade (at least), deriding knowledge as elitism. Then they spend the last few years declaring that the president is actually a foreigner. Now Lowry wants to run a “knowledgeable” Indian-American?
Sometimes I wonder if the GOP establishment has more contempt for the Republican base than liberals do.
Southern Beale
I posted this on the open thread but I think that thred is pretty much dead. This video was just priceless, a little girl at Toys R Us wondering why “companies trick girls into buying the pink stuff…” LOL!!!
amk
roflmao. bobby fucking jindal ? Yeah, that’s the name the racist party would love to have on top of the ticket that will send some awesome tingle up their collective pants.
After pushing the tundra twit and failing miserably in 2008, why is this clueless douchebag still having a job ?
Fucking assholes, all.
Citizen_X
@SiubhanDuinne: Hey, Bobby is extremely knowledge about those Volcano Monitors!
amk
Meanwhile, the brazilians kick the limeys on the economy front.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
Who are these A-Teamers anyway? Is any of them even one iota different on policy from this cycle’s clown car? Or do they just look more presentable?
Southern Beale
@SiubhanDuinne:
SECOND!
pluege
republican/conservatives are too damn dumb to figure out that they don’t have an “A Team”…or a B or C team for that matter. republicanism is a crap cult of mindless stooges that needs to be treated as such. jindal is a joke, as is every other name of note calling themselves republican.
c u n d gulag
@Amir Khalid:
Have you ever read NRO?
If you had, you’d know that they never had any in the first place. :-)
What self-respecting jackass would agree to edit anything some ‘idjit’ like Lowry scribbles?
c u n d gulag
@Southern Beale:
THANK YOU!
That IS LOL hysterical!
And I feel a lot better about our youth just knowing that little girl is out there!
AxelFoley
@debit:
ROFL, I remember that! LMAO
Zach
I knew K-Lo was dumb, but really… there are a dozen reliably conservative Republicans who’d have a better shot at the nomination and election than Jindal. He’s had two chances now to prove himself at the national level (SOTU response and Deepwater Horizon) and he’s uniformly screwed up.
balconesfault
@c u n d gulag: What self-respecting jackass would agree to edit anything some ‘idjit’ like Lowry scribbles?
Self-respecting idiots? There are plenty in the GOP.
Self-aware? A much much shorter list.
mary
Someone I work with told me that if Herman Cain was the nominee then people wouldn’t vote for Obama just because he was black. This was said in all seriousness. There’s a willful blindness among Republicans. I can mention something that was said on the news and they will just deny that is is true. Just deny it…
andy
@dmsilev:
This. The GOP is going to have to suck it up at some time, though a lot of the crazies will stay home.
The problem on the other side is, what with butthurt, some of it justifiable, will too many of the sane stay home too? It won’t help to win the House back and retain the Presidency if the shitbags take the Senate.
ira-NY
Strange. W was elected Presidnet because his last name was Bush. Jeb won’t be, because his last name is Bush.
c u n d gulag
@balconesfault:
You’re right. Point well made!
DanielX
Right. I tremble in fear at the thought of contradicting Rich Lowry (aka Starburstsinhispants), but this IS the Republican A team. All the rest realized they didn’t have a prayer, as the Republican base has gone so far to the right that anyone to the left of Genghis Khan is viewed as being too liberal. The only Republican candidates with even a tenuous grip on reality are Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney. Huntsman doesn’t have a prayer and the Republican base can’t stand Romney, in which the base shares a lot with the rest of the electorate.
It would be superfluous to point out that the Republicans don’t have a great deal of intellectual depth at this point. But when their base thinks that W’s administration ran onto the rocks because W wasn’t conservative enough, well…if any of the Republican candidates have any ideas beyond cutting taxes (on rich folk), cutting regulations (except on women’s naughty parts) and bombing brown people (for which there will always be lots of money), I’ve yet to hear it. It ain’t just a river in Egypt…
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Amir Khalid:
Jindal may be “extremely knowledge” but he isn’t able.
Murakami
@jrg:
There’s really very little doubt about what the Republican insiders think about the teeming, easily manipulated Republican base. The guy who briefly ran Bush’s faith-based initiatives later wrote a tell-all book which described how Rove and his team would meet with various conservative Christian leaders, pretend to be interested in their batshit insane issues, feed them their marching orders, and then ruthlessly mock them afterwards.
Schlemizel
c u n d gulag beat me to it – this clown club IS their A team. Its a sign of just how sick their party is, how bankrupt, morally and intellectually, and how pathetic they have become. I don’t mind that they are killing themselves but they are taking the country with them.
Since others on this thread have suggested that the A team is waiting till ’16 would anyone care to name names? Seriously. I can’t think of a single Republican I would want within 5 miles of the Oval Office. Who?
Dr. Dave
I too can’t figure out who this mythical “A Team” might be. If I mentally try to list the current or recently-former GOP governors, senators, and even House leaders (though when was the last time a President came straight from the House?) from moderately large states, I don’t see anybody who doesn’t have some huge liability that prevents him or her from appealing to either the primary voters or the general electorate. The GOP has reached the bottom of a pretty shallow barrel.
TTT
The teabaggers will never, ever vote for Piyush Jindal. Call it a hunch.
SRW1
Something seems not quite right with this, but I don’t quite have the knowledge to figure out what exactly that something might be.
RalfW
They really can’t see how much they’ve closed the curtain in around themselves. As they sit in the dark, they curse it. And do nothing to see if there is a way to pull it back.
There is still much at risk for democracy, but I think the GOP experiment in right-wing epistemic closure may just produce an ass-whupping of epic proportions. Or a 1% margin for Obama is fine, too.
Mike in NC
Sorry, Richey, but your “A team” isn’t even within a mile of the freaking stadium, so good luck getting them to find the field.
Bex
@mary: I’ve encountered people like that. They are also the ones who shove their political opinions in your face and assume that you will agree, even though they don’t know you.
Ben Cisco
@RalfW:
And the only alternative they have is to light a
candlefuse.Anya
@Southern Beale: That’s one awesomely fierce little girl. Kudos to her parents. I was first introduced to her at Gawker, and I immediately fell in love with her.
Rome Again
From Wikipedia’s Jindal page: “Jindal was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Amar and Raj Jindal, who came to the United States as immigrants from Punjab, India, six months before he was born.[2]” – were either of his parents American citizens when he was born? I get the feeling the birthers will suddenly go silent. Hell, he wasn’t even CONCEIVED in America.
If life begins at conception, Jindal is not a natural born citizen. :P Heh, hehe!
Rome Again
@Southern Beale:
THIRD!
Samara Morgan
jaysus keerist inna handcart.
Jindal assisted in an exorcism and wrote a paper on it in a Catholic mag.
his clown shoes are just as big as Perry’s.
LosGatosCA
@c u n d gulag:
C+ – Wow. Talk about grade inflation
Bubblegum Tate
@mary:
I got banned from a wingnut blog for asking how, exactly, Cain was “a threat to the black vote,” as they liked to put it. It’s just one of those things you’re supposed to accept without question, sorta like the talking point that blacks are the real racists.