Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

We won’t go back.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

This fight is for everything.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

This blog will pay for itself.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

The frogs are rarely mistaken.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

He really is that stupid.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

I really should read my own blog.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

This really is a full service blog.

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Archives for September 2012

I been funny, I been cool with the lines

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I’ve known for a while that the media would stage a kabuki Romney comeback at some point, but I wasn’t sure how they would do it. Steve M. seems to have found the answer:

Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August.

His analysis of the likely media response is dead on:

I’m sure Fox and Drudge and the New York Post already have the list of zingers, and already have a plan, coordinated with the Romney campaign, to declare one of them the line of the evening, the one that embodied Romney’s decisive victory, with the backup choices rank-ordered in case Romney never manages to deliver Choice #1, or in case it falls flat.

That doesn’t worry me too much, because the right lives in its own reality; I’m a bit more worried about the mainstream press — if Romney competently delivers a zinger or two, Chuck Todd will no doubt replicate the restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally, and he won’t be faking. People like him will declare Romney the victor as a result.

It probably won’t matter much, except to convince the Shelly Adelsons of the world to drop more money down the ol’ car elevator.

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Maybe the Saddest Thing Ever

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Earlier today, I saw Gary Johnson on MSNBC, assuring a bewildered interviewer that if his name was mentioned as often as Obama or Romney were mentioned in the news, he would be the next President of the United States. That in and of itself is amusing, but what made it so sad was that he was talking to MSNBC over Skype.

And you thought the optics of the Romney campaign were tragic…

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For Your Reading Pleasure (TL;Ta-Nehisi edition)

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[BTW:  Self-aggrandizement alert]

I believe many reading this site will have already checked out Ta-Nehisi Coates much discussed “Fear of a Black President,” the cover essay in the September issue of The Atlantic.  If not, go check it out, it is smart, rich, and a fine piece of prose style.

As some of you may know, I have the pleasure of calling Ta-Nehisi my colleague this year — he’s teaching at MIT as a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor.  Better yet, his office is literally across the hall from mine, so we chat fairly often.

On the matter of “Fear of a Black President,” that exchange became more formal.  I was struck when I first read the piece by some the craft choices Ta-Nehisi and his editors had made in putting together that long and complex piece of writing.  So I asked Ta-Nehisi if he’d be willing to talk about the writing choices he had made, questions of structure and approach.  He was, and we had two sessions with a digital recorder running.  Unsurprisingly, we couldn’t confine ourselves to technical writing issues:  you make choices about how to write something based on what you’re writing about and what you intend your words to do.  So we talked about the evolution of the themes and meaning of the piece as well as questions of approach or organization.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and, as you can  now check out the edited outcome of all this over at the Nieman Storyboard site.  (The Nieman site is a great resource for both aspiring and established journalists and writers btw, if that’s where your interests lead.)

And with that, how’s the weekend shaping up?

Pieter de Hooch, Conversation, 1663-1665.

Cross posted at Inverse Square

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Can’t you hear me knocking?

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I just did some door-to-door canvassing for Congresswoman Louise Slaughter.

I had to hate doing door-to-door, largely because I got bit by a dog last time. It didn’t break the skin, but it rattled me. But this one went well so I’ll do another shift or two before the election.

Are you guys involved with any volunteer efforts?

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Benghazi

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Even the liberal New York Times thinks that the Obama Administration might have hurt itself by delaying calling the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens “terrorism”. Grandpa John McCain thinks it’s “disgraceful”.

From what I can tell, it’s clear that, for some reason, the Obama Administration wanted to soft-pedal the terrorism angle, and Obama himself was quite reluctant to admit that the attack was terrorism rather than part of a protest over a YouTube video. Does anyone really believe that there’s some kind of election-altering political issue here surrounding some garden-variety White House dissembling?

Obviously, this raises a whole bunch of legitimate foreign policy issues, but the politics of it seem pretty straightforward. Barring some kind of smoking gun, I don’t see much political danger to Obama, especially since Romney is hiding in the corner after he fucked up his initial response.

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Ann, I also have that same concern…

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There were rumors that Team Mitt had benched his wife after her meltdown on Iowa radio last week–rumors that I hoped would prove to be false. Good news. Ann Romney (Mitt’s secret weapon) is back on the trail.

Towards the end of the week she gave an interview to a radio station in Nevada and voiced a concern that I think every American should have (emphasis added):

Asked what her primary worry would be should her husband succeed in defeating President Obama on Nov. 6, Mrs. Romney replied, “You know, I think my biggest concern, obviously, would just be for his mental well-being.”

Me too.

And Ann, I’m a bit worried about Mitt now. It seems to me that his emotional balance and mental well-being are already in the flashing red light zone. I mean, have you heard some of the crazy things he says? He doesn’t seem to be able to tell truth from fiction and he sorta seems to be living a fantasy world.

So Ann, please get Mitt some help. He thinks he is running against the guy in the empty chair that Clint chatted with the night he accepted the GOP nomination. In a few days, he’ll have to debate the real President Obama and I’ m afraid that the cognitive dissonance of the moment will break him long before he has the chance to have the reality of the Presidency crush him.

Better for the world that Mitt has his meltdown now. Thanks Ann, for the well timed warning.

Cheers

 

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