Well played, Mr. Axelrod.
Poll-Axed
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Election 2012, Open Threads, Politics
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Election 2012, Open Threads, Politics
by John Cole| 26 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
So part of the whole not being able to sleep thing is I listened to a couple Mitch Hedberg albums. So I’m sleepy, but laughing my ass off.
This post is in: Election 2012, Excellent Links, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
Another analysis of the Presumed Republican Nominee, from Paul Constant at The Stranger:
As for Mitt Romney? For some reason, the guy has always reminded me of Tom Cruise, and I never could figure out exactly why that was. It’s not that both men have made People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People list, even though they have; or that both men belong to religions that creep everyone else out, even though they do; or that both men are ridiculously wealthy and unnaturally moisturized, even though they are. It wasn’t until watching Romney’s South Carolina concession speech that I finally realized what it was about him that made me think of Cruise.
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In all his movies and, more importantly for our purposes, in all his talk show appearances, Cruise only comes in one flavor—INTENSE. Even when he’s not gibbering up and down on an overstuffed settee, he’s staring directly at the person he’s talking to, his jaw clenched, his eyes smoky and penetrative. He can’t make jokes, because jokes are born of nuance and self-understanding, and Tom Cruise doesn’t have time for any of that shit. He’s busy being Tom Cruise all the goddamned time, and the only thing harder than being Tom Cruise all the time is being Tom Cruise when he’s pretending to interact with other human beings.
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For the last six years, Romney has set his formidable brain to one task: become the perfect Republican presidential candidate. He’s surrounded himself with the best political team money can buy. He’s financed extensive surveys of early primary states, he’s paid experts ridiculous sums of money to run scenarios for every single eventuality that could occur in the 2012 campaign, and he’s in all likelihood dropped exorbitant sums of money in the laps of branding experts to tell him at what angle he should hold the microphone away from his body to look most presidential.
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But like Tom Cruise, Mitt Romney gets lost in the Uncanny Valley because his outsize ambition blinds him. He’s spending all of his time thinking about what a perfect presidential candidate should say and look like and do rather than being a presidential candidate…
But then, some people say Romney’s actually been planning on being president since approximately 1970:
… Upon completion of his foreign mission, he immersed himself in the 1970 senatorial campaign of his mother, Lenore Romney, who was running against Phillip Hart in the Michigan general election. That same year, the Cougar Club — the all male, all white social club at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City (blacks were excluded from full membership in the Mormon church until 1978) — was humming with talk that its president, Mitt Romney, would become the first Mormon president of the United States. “If not Mitt, then who?” was the ubiquitous slogan within the elite organization. The pious world of BYU was expected to spawn the man who would lead the Mormons into the White House and fulfill the prophecies of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith Jr., which Romney has avidly sought to realize…
As the master of modern political journalism wrote: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And if you think this presidential campaign has been pretty weird so far…
This post is in: Open Threads
And the insmonia continues for day 9.
I’ve had this shit before, but it has been bad the past few weeks. And if anyone tells me to exercise, I will pick up and throw my fucking four hundred dollar towel rack exercise bike at your head. I’m using it, god damnit.
It’s 2 Am, Do You Know Where Your Blog Host Is?Post + Comments (109)
This post is in: Election 2012, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
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.
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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.
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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.
Monday Night Open Thread: Willard the BarbarianPost + Comments (67)
by DougJ| 144 Comments
This post is in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
Tebow knows I’m not a speech police, and I agree with John that there’s nothing wrong with describing Jeff Goldberg as a “former Israeli prison guard”, given that his best known work is about his experiences as an Israeli prison guard, but I think everyone should stop using the phrase “Israel firster”. People like Spencer Ackerman have the same attitude and opinions about US policy towards Israel that I (and probably most of you) have, but unlike me (and probably most of you), they’re actively involved with trying to change it. If your political allies find the language you are using offensive and alienating, just better not to use it. What’s the point? Maybe when you say “Israel firster” you mean the real lunatics, but if other Americans who are interested in US policy towards Israel think that you’re questioning their loyalty to the US, then it’s just not productive to use the phrase.
I’ve described Jackson Diehl and Jennifer Rubin as “Israel firsters” before but I won’t again. Yes, they care primarily about what is going on in Israel to the exclusion of other issues, but that’s not what’s wrong with their punditry. What’s wrong with their punditry is that it advocates simple-minded, militaristic right-wing solutions to all of Israel’s problems.
I don’t call Rick Santorum an America-firster, I call him a bigoted, homophobic, right-wing asshole. Diehl and Rubin are bigoted, Islamophobic, right-wing assholes and should be described as such. To describe their support for self-destructive Likud party policies as “pro-Israel” cedes them ground they don’t deserve: I don’t think their blatherings are in any way beneficial to Israel as a nation, in point of fact.
There’s been a lot of discussion of the language that gets used here in the discussion of Israel, and I just wanted to get this off my chest.
by Zandar| 49 Comments
This post is in: Election 2012, Grifters Gonna Grift, Clown Shoes, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, Flash Mob of Hate, Our Failed Media Experiment, Stuff About Black People Written By a Black Person
Having taken over Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog for Steve Benen (now part of the Maddow team at MSNBC, and more power to him there, he’s badly needed), Ed Kilgore is doing a pretty solid job so far. He flags this article from The Hill written by FOX News punching bag Juan Williams and immediately asks the correct question: How long will Juan Williams now last at FOX after stating the obvious about the network’s racial dog-whistle language? Williams states:
The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”
One has to wonder then why Williams is hanging out at FOX News, arguably the number one source for disseminating these code words. I have zero sympathy for the guy, he made his choices and he has to live with them. But Kilgore immediately grasps the issue:
When Newt Gingrich turned Juan Williams into the perfect foil during the January 19 Republican candidate debate in Myrtle Beach, SC, ironic symbolism certainly abounded. Aside from the fact that Newt vaulted himself into the lead by beating up on an African-American journalist on MLK Day in the Cradle of the Confederacy, there was the additional fact that Williams is a Fox News panelist who briefly became a conservative celebrity after NPR fired him for on-air remarks deemed insensitive to Muslims. The debate audience didn’t know or care, presumably viewing Williams as just another “race-card” player who needed to be slapped down for suggesting anyone railing against the work ethic of food stamp recipients might be appealing to atavistic motives.
Now, I think Kilgore is on the right track, but my cynical side wants to move the grubby, Cheeto crud-covered GOP chess pieces forward a few moves and says Williams lobbed such a fat, tasty curveball over the plate of Gingrich in South Carolina for a reason, and that is to make a horse race out of the coronation of Marquis du Mittens as long as possible to keep the faithful glued to the primary noise machine. With Newt down in Florida and big by most accounts, he’s pitched another juicy one right into Gingrich’s ego wheelhouse with the primary just hours away. I don’t know if it’ll do any good, but the plan seems pretty obvious.
Just the kind of scrum FOX excels at creating and running with. Williams knows damn well what he’s doing now, just like he damn well knew what he was doing in South Carolina, people. Weep not for Juan.
Like I said, zero sympathy for this phony simp’s symphony.