From Anne-Laurie’s post this morning on George Romney:
Then, most famously, there was the Vietnam War. He supported it after returning from a trip there in 1965. Then, courageously, after a second trip in 1967, he began to criticize it. On September 4, 1967, a TV interviewer asked, “Isn’t your position a bit inconsistent with what it was, and what do you propose we do now?”
The line everyone remembers from his response: “When I came back from Vietnam in 1965, I just had the greatest brainwashing anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam.” But he continued with a devastating, prophetic, and one-thousand-percent-correct assessment: that staying in Vietnam would be a disaster. The public, and certainly the pundits, weren’t ready to hear it. All they heard was the word “brainwashing” – not in the colloquial sense in which Romney obviously intended it, but as something literal… Romney nose-dived sixteen points in the next Harris poll. As I wrote in my book Nixonland, on Vietnam a national brainwashing continued apace.
We’ve seen this over and over again: someone who is right about something — the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, global warming — is derided at the time (and often even in retrospect, after they’ve been proved right) as a weirdo, out-of-touch, not somebody you’d want to have a beer with.
Don’t get he wrong, I’m all for Goring/Frenchifying Mitt (not that he’s right about anything anyway). It’s all in the game, they played it for them, they can play it for us. The stakes are just too high: Romney, weird and out-of-touch or not, will likely be a disaster for the country, because he’ll be nothing more than Eric Cantor’s and Jim DeMint’s poodle.
But it truly degrades our discourse for the media to turn absolutely everything into earth tones, three-button suits, and supermarket scanners. W probably learned the right lesson from his father, that being a self-effacing pragmatist in office was a mistake politically, that it was better to act as a cowboy king. Mitt probably looks at the example of his own father and realizes it’s better politically to be a soul-less weasel who goes along with his party than to say what he actually believes about things.
It’s hard to see how a system like this is likely to produce good results.
zmulls
Omar Little: “All in the game, yo. All in the game.”
schrodinger's cat
Its all about regression to the mean, don’t stand out too much, or you will be crushed.
kdaug
It won’t.
schrodinger's cat
Whatever happened to the edit function? Did Tunch eated it?
Also our media is full of FAIL, I guess it has always been this way it is nothing new.
schrodinger's cat
DougJ@top
Did you read the Bobo column this morning? Now he is pimping Romney.
Downpuppy
There’s a certain purity in Willard’s campaign. He’s not running for the money, or to accomplish any agenda. He just wants to be President. If he ever knew why he wanted it, it’s long forgotten.
As tempting as it might be to punish him by letting him have it, the worse punishment would be on everybody else.
Angry DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yeah, I know. He doesn’t love him like he loves Santorum though.
taylormattd
Amen.
Although wait Doug, my understanding is that the media will correctly and accurately report upon important issues if only those wimpy democrats bullypulpitted properly.
Linda Featheringill
@Downpuppy: #6
I suspect that thin-skinned Mitt has no idea how much criticism a sitting president takes. No matter what his affiliation.
Lojasmo
@Downpuppy:
As the joker said in Batman Begins.
“i’m like a dog chasing cars. I don’t know what I would do if I caught one.”
schrodinger's cat
@Angry DougJ: Its like an arranged marriage, Bobo has to grin and bear it for the sake of his fambly (GOP).
Roger Moore
The underlying problem is that form is easy and content is hard. Anyone can comment about who is out of touch and who would be great to have a beer with, but only knowledgeable people can discuss whose policy positions are likely to produce results. If your goal is to fill 24 hours a day of programming, a bunch of opinionated bloviators will be a lot cheaper than the hordes of reporters it will take to do real, factual reporting.
The Moar You Know
A government “by the people” without limitations on who can participate and to what degree (corporate personhood and Citizens United, I’m lookin’ at you) will produce a government that, while we surely deserve it, is a government that nobody wants.
Good point, DougJ.
Zifnab
Democracy isn’t stagnant. People wise up with time, particularly when times get tough and people start getting really hurt by the existing rules of law.
You can see this sprouting up here and there, with the Ron Paul libertarians who want to be Republicans but deeply distrust the rank and file Republican party, and the Fireblaggers who constantly feel sabotaged by moderates on the left and have a long list of DINOs to point at to justify their suspicions.
redshirt
We’re now electing folks based on the rules of Reality TV. And like Reality TV, this will persist until voters get bored or turned off or something shiny and new comes along.
schrodinger's cat
@Zifnab:
It does seem to move at a glacial pace, though.
EconWatcher
OT, but you’ll never guess Newt’s favorability rating. According to TPM, it’s currently 27% (Okay, 26.5%, I rounded).
kth
It’s a bit of mythmaking that George Romney would have been the 1968 Republican candidate but for the ‘brainwashing’ gaffe. Romney pere was a Rockefeller Republican, albeit a largely self-made one, was a staunch advocate for civil rights, and that was not where the GOP was headed in 1968.
jayboat
@schrodinger’s cat:
This regression will not stand, man!
(apologies to The Dude… couldn’t help myself)
slag
@Roger Moore:
I don’t necessarily agree with this. Many people love to give away their knowledge. And I, for one, would much rather listen to people who know about shit than pundits or reporters. I think the bigger problem is finding people who are willing to give away their knowledge AND make it understandable to the average 5th grader. Educating the vast majority of us to be smarter than 5th graders is, of course, totally out of the question.
Redshift
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yeah, but that cuts both ways. I shudder to think where we might have been after the Bush Administration if the country could be more easily pushed in a new direction. It was bad enough even with that glacial drag.
schrodinger's cat
@Redshift: I don’t necessarily disagree, but that seems like a Burkean argument or is it Oakeshottian? So many dead conservative punditubbies, so little time…
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@schrodinger’s cat:
Bobo’s been in Romney’s camp for literally years. But most definitely since the start of this campaign.
gaz
@slag: Unless you are a republican, you can’t magically create “knowledge”. In order to share knowledge, you must first obtain knowledge.
The knowledge (in the case of reporters) would require things like “investigative journalism”, etc. This is far more expensive than just hiring somebody to sit on the air and be a gasbag for an hour.
Your comment is silly. I hope it was snark.
Suffern ACE
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: Then why all the time fluffing Huntsman and wishing shorty of Indiana would run? He’s one of those pundits who have been looking for the serious person’s not romney.
schrodinger's cat
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
I think Bobo is a GOP concubine in the media, will serve any GOP master.
cminus
The classic analysis of this phenomenon was Russell Baker’s column of August 18, 1975:
(Read the whole thing. Heck, read anything Baker ever wrote, then weep for the state of modern punditry.)
cminus
Danged edit function, missing when I actually need to edit away the blockquoting fail.
Miki
Stop with the poodle bashing, already. Unlike Mittens, poodles are now and always have been “real” and functional dogs – and those in the know, know they are the http://original versatile hunting/working dog.
BTW – real men” know this.
chopper
read the thread title and for a hot second thought it was an Aus Rotten reference for a second. shit, that was crazy.
Miki
Grrrr – http://www.poodlehistory.org/
chopper
@chopper:
for a second. only for a second, for a second. stupid post-taking-too-long-to-post-so-i-can’t-edit.
Angry DougJ
@chopper:
Sex Pistols.
chopper
yeah, got that. but give us young bloods some red meat from time to time. like i’m imagining if newt walks away with 43% in SC tomorrow you could title the post ‘43% burnt’.
Evolving Deep Southerner (tense changed for accuracy)
@EconWatcher: The other half a percent got confused by the question “Do you like Newt Gingrich or not?”
gocart mozart
@cminus:
See also “prematurely anti-fascist”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-fascism
Cervantes
@cminus: Re being “right too soon,” one is reminded that, in the 1930s and 1940s, volunteers in the anti-Franco Abraham Lincoln Brigade were criticized (and worse) by their fellow Americans for being “prematurely anti-fascist.”
SiubhanDuinne
@EconWatcher:
I’m curious, is Balloon Juice the only blog that’s really been able to pick up and run with the 27% thing, or has it been widely noticed — IOW, is it a meme? Because it’s quite true that the number appears all over the place, but I don’t think I’ve noticed other blogs or columnists or pundits paying particular attention to the odd frequency with which 27% shows up again and again and again.
SiubhanDuinne
Edit? Okay, then, FYWP.
mclaren
eemom on my posts:
General Crackpot Fake Name on my posts:
Mnemosyne on my posts:
And what kind of statements do I make in my posts?
[1] Obama has systematically violated amendments 5, 6, 8 and 14 of the constitution by ordering the murder of a U.S. citizen without a trial and without even charging him with having committed a crime; by signing the NDAA; by continuing to run the second secret prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan where the Red Cross has amassed evidence that torture of prisoners continues under Obama; and by continuing the illegal drone attack war crimes which murder thousands of innocent women and children in Pakistan, a country in which we are not even at war.
[2] That America is rapidly sliding into a militarized police state, with every aspect of American life becoming quasi-military or paramilitary, from the police to even formerly simple routine activities like buying a train ticket (you now must show picture ID, and if you don’t have any, you can’t buy a train ticket, and if you protest, you’ll be tasted, beaten and dragged out like an animal).
[3] That Obama has (unbelievably) increased military spending by 8% while freezing all other government spending, in order to continue endless unwinnable wars with a U.S. military run by incompetent careerist cowards and manned by rapists and gang members who can’t even defeat an enemy force in Afghanistan made up of barefoot 15-year-olds who are armed with bolt-action rifles.
[4] That the American people have shown themselves to be the greatest mass of bully-worshiping sadistic cowards since the slaves Xerxes ordered to whip the ocean topunish it for sinking his fleet at Salamis, due to the American peoples’ ongoing support for torture (polls show 50% of Americans now support torture), kidnapping without trial of U.S. citizens, the murder of U.S. citizens without a trial or charges, and the general abandonment of the rule of law.
[5] That America is sinking into the deepest shadows of barbarism by abandoning the fundmental rule of law that has formed the basis of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence for nearly a thousand years, ever since the Magna Carta, and this will not end well for Americans. (A people who descend into barbarism tend to destroy themselves, as history shows.)
Nancy Irving
I don’t think R-Money would enjoy being president any more than W. did. With W. it was that he just couldn’t take the hard work; with Pious Baloney, he has already shown that he chafes at any opposition, even thinks that opposition to the great leader is some kind of lese-majeste. I imagine he thinks that once he gets to be president the seas will part, and it will be just like being a CEO, where everybody simply does what you tell them to, or they’re fired. If so, it’ll be a rude awakening if he gets elected.
chopper
@mclaren:
clearly, it’s all about you.