Charlie Pierce is not impressed by the mas macho talk about/from Romney’s campaign:
… Willard Romney has made a great effort over the past two days, butching himself up in spiked shoulder pads and hollering for mead and slave women, in order to “get back” what he’d never truly lost in the first place. Yes, he looked like a jackass in South Carolina. In any sane political party, he’d be allowed to brag about that. Now, though, he’s back running in a state that he can carpet-bomb with money, which he will use to explain again how he’s the only one of this troupe of buffoons who even halfway looks like a president. He’s outspent Newt Gingrich five-to-one in a state where all campaigning is done tarmac-to-tarmac. He’s always been the candidate best suited to take advantage of the twisted new landscape of campaign finance, and to take advantage of the fact the most of his party is out of its mind. He’s always been the only one of them operating within the fundamentally overlooked twin realities of this campaign.
__
The test comes afterwards, though. I fear we’re now in for a fearsome period of reality-detached spin. The Republican “Establishment” — although having bottom-feeding slugs like Matt Drudge, indicted crooks like Tom DeLay, superannuated media harpies like Ann Coulter, and Bob Dole, The Vengeful Undead, for your “establishment” illustrates another story about Republicans that’s worth a second look, but won’t get it — has lined up impressively behind Willard Romney, who has abnegated himself impressively enough just to make that happen.
__
Do we see a Romney victory as a triumph of tactics, as a victory for those tough-as-nails Ostrogoths who hired on from such fallen juggernauts as the Bachmann campaign? Or do we understand that there is nothing important about Willard Romney as a candidate that has changed at all. He is still an unprincipled opportunist, incapable of telling the truth about his own record, and utterly without conscience when it comes to lying about someone else. Almost everything he says about the incumbent president is just as much a lie as it was when he said it in Iowa, or in New Hampshire, or in South Carolina, or 10 goddamn minutes ago. He still so represents the kind of capitalism that nearly wrecked this country that Thomas Nast might come back from the dead just to draw “GREED” with his face. All of this was true a week ago. All of this will be true next week. And next month. And in November, when the threadbare puppet theater finally comes down.
FFrank
Okay, That’s an easy pic to do. Create a Shepard Fairey Style artwork that has Willard with the word “GREED”
MikeJ
@FFrank:
Step 1. Get pic
Step 2. Use the generator
Step 3. Find somebody who doesn’t mind signing up for web things to do it so you can get the link.
Villago Delenda Est
Barack Obama is the luckiest man alive, since Bill Clinton.
“O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.”
Was coined two centuries ago by a guy who saw what the GOP would turn into.
Martin
“Ostrogoths”? Really? Somebody remembered to tear a page off their word-of-the-day desk calendar.
mclaren
@Villago Delenda Est:
Supreme political skill has a way of looking eerily like luck.
I just wish Barack Obama were as skilled a leader and political negotiator and crafter of legislative proposals as he is a politican.
eemom
I wonder if Charlie Pierce knows he’s got a trained parrot.
mclaren
@Martin:
Uneducated oafs like you guys in management have no idea that ostrogoth is the counterpart of visigoth. But then, as we all know, IQ drops as you go up the management ladder — which tells us that you must be very high on the management ladder indeed. Probably a CEO.
Brian S
This remains my favorite Romney photo ever, even if it is from the 2008 campaign.
Villago Delenda Est
@mclaren:
Um….
Both Visigoths and Ostrogoths were Germanic tribes during Classical times, invaded the Roman Empire. The Visigoths established a kingdom in what is now Spain. The Ostrogoths were a bit less organized, and were found in the area that was the former Yugoslavia.
Which is why it’s used to characterize Willard the Barbarian.
piratedan
@mclaren: well you try passing legislation with that pack of freaking couch fainters and .then tell me how you’re gonna bully pulpit them all into line when your legislative history as the junior senator from Illinois doesn’t exactly emblazen your way into the blue dog stratosphere
Rafer Janders
Note to self: DO NOT get Charlie Pierce pissed off at me.
Skalite
Just a point:
It it technically correct to refer to Tom Delay as an “indicted crook”, however it is far MORE accurate to refer to him as a “convicted felon”. One must be indicted to be convicted, but the conviction has happen so we can drop the point of calling him “indicted”, which can carry with it the connotation that he may not be guilty. It’s been proven in court that Tom Delay is, in fact, guilty.
Martin
@mclaren: I didn’t say I didn’t know who the Ostrogoths were, but if your intent is to get an audience to follow a line of thought, why toss out a speedbump like that? There were more readily understood means of making that point without resorting to Ostrogoths, who are hardly unique or colloquial enough to rely on.
Skalite
@Skalite:
*happened* The conviction has “happened”, not “happen”.
Fuck, it all, notice the gramatical fuck-up just as its posting.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@eemom: Well, he does have Balloon Juice on his blog roll…
Rafer Janders
@Villago Delenda Est:
Actually, most of the Ostrogoths wound up in what is present day Italy along with the Balkans, and the Ostrogoth king Theodoric the Great became the de facto king of Italy (de facto because he acknowledged the Eastern Roman Emperors (aka the Byzantine Emperors) Zeno, and then Justinian, as his overlord. (Justinian eventually sent his general Belisarius to oust the Ostrogoths from control of Italy, and they then died out as an independent people).
And the Visigoths didn’t just settle in Spain, but also moved on to North Africa, where they established a kingdom in what is now present day Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, a kingdom they held until being overrun by the Muslim Arabs.
Patrick
@MikeJ
How’s this?
http://i40.tinypic.com/wtv9sp.jpg
Hooray for PrntScrn.
amk
mittens sings. jeebus.
burnspbesq
Your next iPad is likely to be assembled in Brazil. Foxconn and the Brazilian government have reached agreement on a very juicy package of tax incentives in return for Foxconn investing $12 billion to set up shop there.
Anne Laurie
@amk: Unlike President Obama covering Al Greene, I doubt anyone’s gonna want Willard as their ring tone. Not even the little Mormon drones on his campaign staff!
ChrisNYC
Totally bizarre that all these people are saying that Mitt is winning by dint of Coulter. Romney is winning because he bought millions in air time and has been educating FLA voters on what a horrible, lying, reprehensible leech Gingrich is. Gingrich did and does real damage to this country. Deserves every 30 second ad and every mention of “resigning in disgrace.” I am so so so enjoying him being exposed for what he is. Gonna be fun to watch his concession speech tomorrow.
Hill Dweller
@amk: This, like the leaked picture of them doing laundry, is trying was too hard.
amk
@Hill Dweller: He is fucking up even the phoniness, which is his forte.
amk
@Anne Laurie: It’s called leading from behind (of everything Obama did yesterday/last week). A fucking cretin.
El Cid
The right’s crew of power thinkers manages to piss of GM’s right wing, scornful, Republican chief Bob Lutz, because, you know, all Chevy Volts blow up because Al Gore is Fat and GM’s now just a Stalinist PC hippie government ward.
Lutz is funny. You should read it.
The problem is that Bob Lutz is some parasite who doesn’t create American jobs, like Steve Jobs and Mitt Romney did.
Of course, in the end, Lutz has to go back to fantasizing that such lying hurts the conservative cause, and only commies like Al Gore and his Global Warming charade ever lie.
Enjoy your friends on the right while you can, Bob.
amk
Dems on fast & furious – nothing to see here.
El Cid
Oh, god-damnit, I forgot to edit out Bob Lutz’ invocation of the term “Soshullist” in his angry mockery of the FoxNOOZ dumbasses making bullshit up about how every Chevy Volt is a’splodin’ ’cause Obama made GM build it, so just go read his tirade so the moderation software won’t freak.
It’s great when you make loudmouth right wing prick GM chief Bob Lutz openly bitch about how full of shit the “right wing media” is. In Forbes, no less.
Anne Laurie
@Brian S: To add the cherry on that giant FAIL sundae: In upper-lower Michigan, “fudgie” is the perjorative term for the kind of obnoxious tourists ‘who come over the bridge with one shirt and a twenty-dollar bill, and a week later they haven’t changed either one‘.
Villago Delenda Est
@Rafer Janders:
Wasn’t that the Vandals in N Africa?
Yeah, looked at the wrong page for the Ostrogoths…they sort of took over Italy, didn’t they?
Bottom line…two tribes of barbarians. Have no idea what Mclaren was referring to.
FlipYrWhig
@Martin: I don’t think anyone would have to recognize who the Ostrogoths were for the quip to be worth making, though. The stylistic merit of “Ostrogoth” is that it takes “Goth” and turns it up a notch.
YellowJournalism
This thread reminded me of this exchange:
Doofenshmirtz: No, no. I- I just called to remind you that I will be picking up you and your Visigoth friends up after the dance.
Vanessa: Dad, it’s goths, not Visigoths. And they’re punks, not goths. (Hangs up)
Doofenshmirtz: Ah. (Turns to a Visigoth who is standing next to the park bench he and Perry are sitting on) Sorry, Ulrich, I thought they were Visigoths. You’re not going to impress the punks. You’re free to go.
FlipYrWhig
@Villago Delenda Est: Mclaren (which my iPad wants to autocorrect to “Macarena”) is just settling an old score with Martin, I take it. “Haha ur dumb” crossed with “capitalist running dog,” pretty much.
Villago Delenda Est
@El Cid:
Looks like the fabulous Ms. Laurie took care of that for you, I’m seeing the tirade, and it’s a righteous one.
Tumbrels for all those assholes.
mclaren
@piratedan:
The issue isn’t that Obama was incapable of passing legislation, it’s that the legislation he got passed was incompetently drafted, poorly thought-out, and foolishly designed.
Let’s take some specific examples:
A skillful legislator would’ve included a rider in the stimulus package that ratcheted up more stimulus automatically if the economy failed to revive as expected.
A skillful negotiator would’ve told the Republican majority in the House that they could easily get tax cuts for the rich as long as they came out of military spending.
A skilled leader would be running right now against the “do-nothing congress that has frittered its term away” just as Harry Truman did against the do-nothing congress in 1948.
Obama’s inexperience and lack of negotiating skill shows every time he engages with the Republicans. They played him like a fiddle. Take a look at Bil Clinton’s negotations with the Newt-controlled 1995 congress to see the work of a true master negotatior.
Martin
@burnspbesq: Actually, probably not. I think the Brazil iPads will stay in Brazil or at least South America. I believe Pegatron got the iPad 3 contract for everywhere else so that Foxconn can focus on trying to crank out enough iPhones to satisfy China (expected to surpass the US as Apple’s largest market this year).
El Cid
@Villago Delenda Est:
Of course it’s funny that with just a bit of justified elision, the head of GM is asking this, publicly, in a magazine mostly known for celebrating the festishizers of super-wealth:
“What on Earth is wrong with the conservative media movement that it feels it’s OK to spread false information… OK to hurt an…American company… OK to hurt American employment… as long as it damages the Obama administration’s reputation?“
If only as GM went, so went the nation.
FlipYrWhig
@mclaren: Oh Jesus Christ. A skillful negotiator could stop Ben Nelson from being a douchebag because, hey, he’s full of skill, amirite?
FlipYrWhig
@mclaren: Clinton’s whole thing was claiming Republican initiatives as his own, getting them passed with Republican support, and then running on them as his achievements. Time passes, Republicans seethe. Next Dem president, Republicans decide that they weren’t even going to let Republican ideas pass, because he’ll get to claim victory. 21st century Republicans oppose their own agenda, just for spite. You can’t out-negotiate nihilists.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
I’m trying to hold on to hope that professional backlash against the WSJ’s stupid Climate Change Denialist bullshit will help the cause…but that’s assuming I have hope left. I’ve long conceded that the issue has become a dead one, since it feels like no matter what, the cast has been set: America has bought into the bullshit and finds that 98% of climate scientists are simply the biggest fucking retards in the history of forever and the consensus simply means it’s a big giant Al Gore conspiracy. And any attempts to actually inform people of the data simply means “FUCK YOU LIARS!!” and people become even MORE against you, and the more you try, the more people simply fucking hate you more.
Martin
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes you can! And if you don’t know how, well, you’re just a tard and an obot and probably even a C-E-O.
amk
Idjit perry burned his millions. Thanks Texas for showing the country what morons you are.
Hill Dweller
@FlipYrWhig: Along those lines, Obama is reportedly going to announce a jobs package with will include ideas from the Chris Coons/Marco Rubio bill this week.
amk
why do peeps here engage useful idiots like mclaren ?
El Cid
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik: The petro-conglomerates did the same thing Big Tobacco did: hire a bunch of flacks to convince everyone that there was a ‘controversy’ and things were still up in the air.
Also, global warming is caused by the Sun which I know because the Sun is very big and really hot and no scientists have ever thought of studying the Sun before and whether or not it being big and hot affected the Urf at all.
El Cid
@amk: “Oops.”
FlipYrWhig
@Martin: If all Obama needed was 51 votes, we’d have a bounty of progressive victories. But convincing senators to punt away their filibuster superpower is just not possible. It’s stupid, and hurts the country, and hurts the Democratic party, but a bunch of Democratic senators like it that way anyway, and they’re not teachable.
handy
@El Cid:
And don’t forget the thermometers next to air conditioners! Can’t forget those!
FlipYrWhig
@Hill Dweller: I didn’t know there was such a bill. Interesting. I’ll be curious to see what happens with it.
Hill Dweller
@FlipYrWhig: I didn’t either until I saw it in the comments section of another blog.
trollhattan
@El Cid:
For the sheer semi-pleasure of being pedantic, Lutz is no longer with GM, although he did champion the Volt while still there.
The winger hatred of all things Volt/Prius/Leaf/Subaruish is a thing of wonder. Best to take the Eff tree-fiddy to the mall.
Martin
@amk: Writing code. Waiting for databases to update. Need more entertainment than the naked girl in the corner of the screen can provide.
piratedan
@mclaren: good for you if you wanna believe that Bill Clinton was a skillful negotiator who was able to play the Congress as a well oiled machine. Then again, he could have simply been a blue dog Dem, who was able to negotiate with a Republican party that hadn’t completely lost its sanity because he operated in a political environment that wasn’t completely tainted by outside money and hatred. Unlike events that have taken place over the last decade, a good many of us actually take it on good faith that shitheels like Mitch McConnell were being absolutely truthful when they stated that they were no longer interested in working on behalf of the American people and that their full efforts would be applied to making Obama a one term President and scuttling every part of his agenda and hamstringing his ability to govern.
If you think that the magical bully pulpit would solev everything, then you might as well invest in some magic Mormon underpants.
handy
@trollhattan:
Let freedom ring! Let the truck nutz swing!
Martin
@FlipYrWhig:
See. I told you. Your confession saved mclaren a bunch of typing.
J. Michael Neal
Odds that mclaren had good things to say about Clinton at the time?
El Cid
@trollhattan: Holy crap, I forgot Lutz retired from GM. Why isn’t he just kissing up to Fox Nation to sell more of his inspirational business leadership books? Does the man not understand how the spirit of free enterprise works?
Martin
@J. Michael Neal: Well, it’s a sliding scale, you see. I mean, Obama may be no Bill Clinton, but then Clinton was no Jimmy Carter. I mean, how many solar panels did Clinton put on the White House?
What, are you some kind of Clintonbot?
El Cid
@trollhattan:
Better be the F-350, because the best-selling vehicle in the world, the F-150, is now most commonly ordered not with a common sense patriotic American V-8, but a homosexual San Francisco V-6 with god-damn arugulaganic turbochargers, because the American people were hypnotized with Kenyan magic into caring more about the better performance and lower fuel economy than they were about upholding the sanctity of octocylindrical tradition.
El Cid
Gingrich is awsum.
Got to give credit to Romney, though, for realizing the sort of tone which really drives Gingrich crazy, because there’s no worse thing for Gingrich than not being recognized and feared as the Churchillian/ Genghis Khan millenial civilization-saving / enemy vanquishing super-human he knows he is:
If you want to push Gingrich into another crybaby tantrum, talk to him like this.
Martin
@El Cid:
7.8 out of 10
Call us when he accuses Romney of shoving Jewish grandmothers into soçialized health-care death ovens and then baptizing their ashes.
El Cid
@Martin:
Come now, we don’t want to get all silly and suggest that conservative politicians would ever stoop to such levels.
You’d just need to point out how the Mormon church is trying to infiltrate our Christian country with African values, because one time Romney might have said something which sounded a lot like that when he was in France consorting with all those radical types, and something something Kenya.
burnspbesq
@amk:
“why do peeps here engage useful idiots like mclaren ?”
Hope dies hard. There is the occasional faint glimmer of intelligence there, it’s just misused.
It’s like Batman. He always believed, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Catwoman could be rehabilitated.
burnspbesq
@El Cid:
F-150 drivers are the worst. I’d like to nuke them all from orbit, or drop a Kia on their empty heads.
burnspbesq
@El Cid:
Gingrich channelling Taibbi.
The Onion has truly become irrelevant.
MikeJ
@burnspbesq: I somehow doubt that our troll would look as good as Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, Eartha Kitt, Michelle Pfeiffer, or Halle Berry.
I think Batman was thinking with the little bat.
Triassic Sands
@Skalite:
Forget the typo/grammatical error — you got the important part right.
I came here to point this out as well. However, even though you’ve already noted that DeLay has been convicted, I get so much pleasure saying and writing it, that I simply must add my voice to yours in saying that DeLay is a CONVICTED FELON.
Someone needs to tell C. Pierce that DeLay is now a convicted money launderer. He’s out on bail pending appeal.
Frankensteinbeck
@piratedan:
Mclaren lives in its own bizarre fantasy world where Obama has long since expanded us into ‘3-4 permanent unwinnable wars’. The belief that a congress threatening revolt over the stimulus as it was could have been convinced to make it self-inflating is another great window into this alien landscape.
Charlie Pierce The Actual Topic Of This Thread:
Nothing has changed about Romney. He’s still a pathetic B list candidate who gets gasps of amazement when he doesn’t humiliate himself in a debate. His opponents are insane, wildly incompetent, or both. They’ve always been insane, wildly incompetent, or both. Despite that, he STILL hovers every moment on the brink of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.