Never woulda seen that coming…he had so much appeal, such a fresh message…
Next!!
2.
piratedan
yes, but I’m sure the grift continues nonetheless
3.
Morzer
Looks like CornerStone’s confident predictions of the Mittster and Jeb leading the field took even less time to collapse than usual.
Heckuva job, Corny.
4.
samiam
Let’s get one thing straight. It wasn’t Rmoneys choice. It was Murdoch’s and Koch’s.
I’m quite disappointed. The clown car is that much less interesting now.
5.
MattF
So, I won’t have Mitt to kick around any more. Boo Hoo.
It should be noted that his latest incarnation, Mitt “I care about the little people” Romney, was so ridiculous that even Republicans found it unattractive.
6.
Corner Stone
@Morzer: Still believe it will be Jeb, so no worries on my part, Morzy.
7.
Elizabelle
Feel the Jeb!mentum.
2016 is going to be a big year for Elizabelle. GOP wins and I will be choosing one of our fine allied countries for a years-long expat visit.
8.
Elizabelle
Whatever Mittlet that is has a future on Star Trek as an extraterrestrial (granted, one of the more classically appealing ones) or as an Instagram face that pops up when some company’s mad your bill payment is not in on time. Scold, scold, scold.
The NYTimes just had a big front-page article about how much Murdoch loathes Mittens.
10.
max
“What do you mean ”you’re not running again”, Dad?”
Bet he changes his mind.
max
[‘Somebody got to him.’]
11.
Davis X. Machina
Who fulfills the White Horse Prophecy now?
Orrin’s getting a little old… Huntsman tried, and whiffed.
Tom Udall?
12.
spudvol
Why is there a picture of Derek Dooley on this site?!
13.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Elizabelle: I’m trying to picture him in a blond wig. I’ve never been good at seeing family resemblances, but is it just that frozen glower of frustrated entitlement that makes him look just like his mother?
Whatever Mittlet that is has a future on Star Trek as an extraterrestrial
It’s the faux-Vulcan ears.
15.
Amir Khalid
So it will not be Mitt who fulfills the White Horse prophecy. I half expect Ann Romney to give another TV interview lamenting dreams (of FLOTUS-hood) that cannot be, and storms she cannot weather.
16.
Nicole
I wonder what made him change his mind. Maybe he woke up to a dancing horse head in his bed.
17.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Nicole: Maureen Dowd, back when she was relevant, always said Big Bad Bar was the heavy among the WASP Corleones. I tremble for dear Rafalca.
18.
West of the Cascades
@Elizabelle: I vote for Chile. Socialist single Mom president, good wine, lots of sunshine, occasional earthquakes.
Romney, was so ridiculous that even Republicans found it unattractive.
Except for the GOP polls that showed him at the top of the heap.
28.
Elizabelle
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It’s the Anne face, when Rafalca’s dancing lessons come in a little more expensive than she’d expected. “What do you mean I have to pay for that? Do you think I am made of money?”
He’s waiting to be begged to come back as the savior of the party.
All the dwarves are going to concentrate on Bush now. Romney’s hope is that one of the attacks sticks, but the money guys still need a boring white guy out front. That’s when he charges back in on the White Horse.
The NYTimes just had a big front-page article about how much Murdoch loathes Mittens.
Because he lost to the dusky guy, in 2012. Also in 2012 all the runts in the campaign were complaining that Fox had a thumb on the scale for Mittens. And they did.
31.
catclub
@Mike J: Who was mentioning 16 gigaflipflops per second?
You might think that’s hyperbole re moving, but it’s not.
34.
Alex S.
While my prediction of a Bush/Walker ticket is now even more likely to come true, I somewhat regret Mitt’s decision. A little cannibalism between conservatives would have made things easier. A Romney/Bush showdown would have been a wonderful sight to see.
Now there is little to keep Jeb from locking up the big donors early
Well, two weeks ago, when Mittens said he was interested, the unified chorus of hate from the GOP elite
(also, Jennifer Rubin) was impressive. Presumably impressively unified by Jeb’s team.
36.
Belafon
Had a guy at work doing the “It’s cold outside, therefore global warming can’t be happening.” I’m just imagining people like him in the future: “The sun isn’t going out. Hell, it’s getting bigger.”
37.
Josie
I find it a bit disturbing to wonder who is rich and/or powerful enough to convince Mitt to pull out of the race. This, who or whatever it is, is what we will be up against. The Clintons may be the only ones who stand a chance.
38.
Tree With Water
Romney make some president a great housing and urban development chief one day.
39.
Bobby Thomson
@Morzer: to the contrary, Jeb has a clear shot now because the far right is divided and he will have the money to play whack a mole.
I find it a bit disturbing to wonder who is rich and/or powerful enough to convince Mitt to pull out of the race. This, who or whatever it is, is what we will be up against.
The Bush Crime Family doesn’t play around. Jeb must have shown Mitt his list of committed donors.
41.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mike J: He’s waiting to be begged to come back as the savior of the party.
I’d say that’s highly plausible. 2016 is a much tougher GOP primary, and I just don’t see Jebbie has the talent or the grit to take on real knife fighters; the Bushes hire out when dirty work needs done (Rove, Atwater), and I don’t think that’ll work anymore. But Cruz, Paul and Huckabee are IMHO unelectable, and the same people who panicked when Rick Santorum had a good couple weeks in Feb ’12 aren’t gonna like it if it looks like one of the goons is gonna take Jebbie down
John Dingell ✔ @JohnDingell
Follow
Congratulations to Mitt Romney for finally saying something the American people want to hear.
10:59 AM – 30 Jan 2015
700 Retweets 518 favorites
46.
Fred Dickinson
So with another Bush all but certain now, who still thinks “looking forward, not back” was a good idea?
47.
Citizen_X
Somewhere, Chris Christie is thundering, ‘SO WHAT THE FUCK AM I, CHOPPED LIVER?”
(Yes, yes, I know: a whole lot of chopped liver.)
48.
Keith G
As I said in the previous thread, I don’t think Mitt was ever truly serious about running for president this time. And the augers were not good. Once he had time to talk to bundlers outside the Mormon faith there wasn’t much going for him.
Once the clown show clears up, the real GOP choice will probably be between Jeb and Christy. Of those two, Christy will be the most nightmarish candidate as far as the Democratic Party is concerned. Which might be the lever he uses to obtain the nomination.
49.
beltane
@Citizen_X: There was a video of Christie falling out of a chair making the rounds of Facebook this morning so he does have that going for him.
50.
Davis X. Machina
This development will reduce the saliency of issues of poverty and inequality in the upcoming GOP campaign from zero, to a number less than zero.
51.
Belafon
@Fred Dickinson: Prosecuting George wouldn’t have had any more effect on Jeb than actually starting the war under false pretenses and tanking the economy did.
What, you thought he was gonna spend his own money? That’s an idiot move, something losers do. He didn’t do it the last two times so why the hell would he start now?
But then again… Bush – enough baggage to fill an oil tanker. Walker – should be about the time he is in court over actions while in Milwaukee. He also tends to break out the stupid-prompter often.
Apologies for the O/T, but holy fuck, what is wrong with these women?
Law enforcement just dropped assault charges against George Zimmerman, who allegedly threw a wine bottle at his girlfriend two weeks ago. According to the Associated Press, Zimmerman’s girlfriend recanted her statement, continuing a cycle of accusations against Zimmerman followed by recantations that are typical of domestic violence cases.
Apologies for the O/T, but holy fuck, what is wrong with these women?
Not necessarily much. ‘Get the creep out of my life rightaway’ vs having to be scared for months of being stalked and threatened is not necessarily an unreasonable decision. As long as the creep really fucks off.
71.
Elizabelle
Do you think Jeb! will wear well in the coming months?
I do not. Memories are short, but not that short. Despite how much the corporate legacy media wants to talk him up.
If he were locked up, stalking wouldn’t be an issue. I don’t see how a woman dropping charges “get[s] the creep out of [her] life.” Seems to me that just allows even more opportunities for him to be in it.
Remember the epic glory of Rick Perry, Michele Bachman, Newt Gingrich and Hermann Cain sharing a stage?
Dumbness is evidently not a problem.
78.
max
@Mike J: All the dwarves are going to concentrate on Bush now. Romney’s hope is that one of the attacks sticks, but the money guys still need a boring white guy out front. That’s when he charges back in on the White Horse.
Yeah, but…
@Josie: I find it a bit disturbing to wonder who is rich and/or powerful enough to convince Mitt to pull out of the race. This, who or whatever it is, is what we will be up against. The Clintons may be the only ones who stand a chance.
Here’s the thing: Mitt clearly thinks he won or should have won in 2012. But he didn’t. And the other Republicans said lots of nasty things about him that discouraged him enough to make him say he wouldn’t run again. But he clearly thought he got ripped and he thinks he can beat Hillary. He was, additionally, leaking like a sieve for the last year with hints that he intended to make up the mantle.
That said, there are two very powerful independent forces in the Republican primary besides the voters (who like Mitt apparently) – the Koch Bros. and Fox News. If Murdoch hates Mitt and wants him out, and the Koch Bros. want to back Jeb! (or whomever), then Romney might suddenly be looking at a changed situation. He’s ‘only’ a quarter-billionaire, and the Koch Bros. have pledged to spend 889 million in advertising this campaign. He would be outgunned in the carpet-bombing depart if he went up against them, especially if he was caught in a crossfire with Fox News going hard against him.
If your opponents have way more free air time and paid ads, Mitt’s money would get spent to no effect. The sudden reversal here indicates he got the impression (suddenly) that he would be outgunned, in spite of the fact that he clearly believes he’s the best candidate in the field (a dark comment on the clown car), and that he’s well positioned to win. Ergo, he experienced a sudden money boy veto.
Ergo, if there’s an opening for him, as Siubhan notes, then he’s left the option open.
max
[‘Which means he’ll get in as soon as any kind of reverse occurs. Given that this is Romney, the temptation will strike soon.’]
79.
vhh
“I could have been a contendah.”
80.
Villago Delenda Est
@Morzer: “I can fix this bad boy. I just know I can!”
This is what happens when you “look to the future ” rather than putting war criminals in prison where they belong.
In terms of crackpot theories of causation, Murray and Herrenstein have nothing on you.
82.
Turgidson
The Romney sons’ feelings about this must be mixed. On one hand, of course they think it would be totally awesome if their dad was president. They would be able to seriously burn their trust fund brat friends with that one. “Is YOUR obscenely wealthy father PRESIDENT? No? Then shut up, I’m better than you.”
On the other hand, if Mittens was running and got into trouble, he might be tempted to dip into his own fortune to steady the ship. Unacceptable to his sons. That’s THEIR money, dammit. Come on, pop, we have to split that measly sum FIVE ways. We’ll barely be able to buy our own fleet of helicopters as it is! Go beg your pals for more money before you spend ours!
But then again, look how rich the Clintons got after Bill’s presidency. Maybe dad can do that too and get even richer before he kicks the bucket and we get what’s ours.
A lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lot of strands in old Tagg’s head.
Also, I suspect that while Mitt might be serious about not running right now, he fully expects to be begged to jump into the race when the clown car demolition derby really gets going and starts damaging all the other plausible candidates. And it will.
83.
Buddy H
@Corner Stone: The Bush Crime Family doesn’t play around. Jeb must have shown Mitt his list of committed donors.
I wish a waiter had recorded that conversation: “Mitt, you know I love you, I love you like a brother, but it’s just not your time. You gotta drop out, you gotta take a fall, for the good of the brotherhood.”
84.
Citizen Scientist
@beltane: I don’t know. That video makes it look less that Christie fell out of a chair and more like the chair moved out of the way.
85.
srv
White Power:
Washington (CNN)If Jim Webb had his way, the Democratic Party would return to its “Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Andrew Jackson roots” and put a greater focus on “white, working people.”
Webb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia who is entertaining a run 2016 presidential nomination, told NPR Friday morning that his party has not focused enough on white, working class voters in the past elections. In order to be successful in the future, Webb said, that will need to change.
“I think they could do better with white, working people and I think this last election showed that,”
86.
Amir Khalid
@Turgidson:
Then again, Bill and Hilary started from a much smaller wealth base than Mitt and Ann’s. So there was a much greater percentage gain in wealth.
87.
hoodie
Looks like the money people want something like Bush/Walker, a real White Man Restoration. Bush gets to replay “compassionate conservatism.” According to the Village, Walker passed the test in Iowa to be the loyal Koch asshole playing to the teabilly base. Christie is out of luck because the Villagers like them some Bushes, and Rand Paul, if he runs, will suffer the same fate as his father. The fringe candidates will be buried under a mountain of money. I dread this campaign, because it will likely be the usual Villager gossip about the Clintons and courtier fawning over the Bushes, including rehabilitation of the worst president in modern history.
88.
MomSense
Did anyone watch that Romney documentary on Netflix? It didn’t seem to me like the Romney family wanted Mitt to run last time. I didn’t get the sense Romney even wanted to be President all that badly.
89.
Villago Delenda Est
@srv: Well, I think Jim Webb is showing his Scots-Irish roots there. Heavily Scots-Irish areas of the Appalachians and Ozarks went from blue in 2004 to red in 2008. Jeez I wonder why?
(full disclosure…I’m of Scots-Irish ancestry on my dad’s side…but I’m striving hard to get over it, except for the kilts and tartans part)
90.
opiejeanne
@Davis X. Machina: Is a Democrat allowed to fulfill the White Horse prophecy?
If it’s between Walker and Santorum, the republican party is dumber than I imagine. Maybe dumber than I can imagine.
International relations and security policy will play a much bigger role than is even apparent now. That would leave the ground of this campaign season a little bit more shaky for someone like Walker or Santorum regardless of what other supposed qualities they are seem to possess. In NCAA terminology, I doubt they make it past the semifinals.
I agree with your assessment of the Bush crime family…. these folks do not play. They will bring out all their fire power to make sure JEB! gets his “turn”.
If Hillary wants this, I hope that she is ready if he is the nominee for the Repubs. The Bushies invented slime politics going back to GHWB who killed Dukakis with that black prisoner improperly paroled (can’t remember his name)….
94.
gf120581
I doubt this is the last of Mitt. He probably still holds out hope of the other contenders taking each other out and then he swoops in as a savior.
Hell, given Jeb’s weakness and the wide open nature of the GOP field (there is no front runner), he may have reason too.
I imagine Murdoch may have had something to do with forcing Mitt’s hand here, though. He REALLY hates Mitt.
I suspect the calculation is that a conviction for having thrown a wine bottle wouldn’t get George Z that much time behind bars and therefore the woman not much protection, but it might anger him enough so that he’d become a danger when he’s released.
The real stupidity is in getting involved with a dude like Zimmerman, especially when ‘I didn’t think he’d turn out like that’ isn’t much of an excuse.
96.
gf120581
@Elie: Of course she is. She’s been through this before with the Bushes, remember? If she needs pointers, she can just ask Bill.
@balconesfault:
The Kochs founded the Birchers and funded the House folks who wanted to default on the debt. The CoC are greedy businessmen. Romney is a greedy businessman. The Kochs are insane, racist conspiracy theorists who say they’re socially liberal but sure spend a lot of money backing social conservatives. Whyever they don’t like Romney, it’s not because he’s insufficiently business. Might be because they hate loser stink, which is sorta like a bad investment but from a different framework.
@Belafon: and @Fred Dickinson:
Especially since George would have been completely legally vindicated. Congress and the Supreme Court would damn well make sure of that.
what policies would benefit just white working people without helping all working people? A tax break if you are white? White only schools (don’t we have those already?)
It is totally disgusting that a Democrat would say something horrible like that… beyond disgusting — repugnant and very self defeating. Obamacare — which democrats ran from in the last election — helps a lot of working class white people who did not have coverage. Its provisions allow young adults with low salaries to get covered under their parents and eliminates pre-existing conditions. Lilly Ledbetter and a bunch of other initiatives helped working class people of all stripes…
Hope she has some of her own slime to dole out… as I said, the Bushies are not only prolific slimers, but they are sneaky and back door slime sophisticates….Bar is the “heart of darkness”
101.
Calouste
@Elie: The Bushes didn’t invent slime politics. That goes back to the first or second election after George Washington.
102.
sparrow
@Elie: Jim Webb is a fucking narcissist troll and he can go die in a fire for all I care.
Mitt will change his mind six more times before the year is out. He’s got something up his sleeve.
104.
Trentrunner
It’s pretty simple:
The last time we turned over our peaceful, prosperous country to a President Bush, we ended up with two unfinished wars, double-digit unemployment, and three-thousand dead Americans on our own soil.
Why would this time be any different?
Also, for the rhyming-inclined, when Jeb inevitably tries to distance himself from Dubya:
“You claim the name, but not the shame.”
105.
Trentrunner
@sparrow: I heard that interview on NPR, and what struck me (besides the racism) is that after it was over–and it was longer than your usual sound-bite interview–Webb hadn’t named one single thing he wanted to do as president. All he could say was, “Let’s give poor white people a voice.” Period. It was weird.
106.
Jeffro
@Corner Stone: You’re 50% wrong already…quit while you’re ahead.
@Elie: “The Bushies invented slime politics going back to”….1800?
Slime in politics is a very old and very American. A modern difference being people usually don’t get shot over it.
108.
Jeffro
@SarahT: Why isn’t Hillary trolling Mittens with the exact same comment?
109.
Elizabelle
Am thinking Joaquin Phoenix could play this Mittlet. And maybe his dad too.
In the biopic.
Which will never get made.
110.
Doug r
@max:Mittens is just saying that because that’s what he wants us to believe.
111.
JPL
@Trentrunner: Sounds like he’s running for vp on the I can motivate the white people ticket. what an ass.
112.
max
@Doug r: Mittens is just saying that because that’s what he wants us to believe.
Yeah, and? He’s taken so many positions on whether he wants to run for President or not, he must have exposed his true motivations at some point. He was all set up for campaign takeoff, and then he got spooked. {shrugs}
The last time we turned over our peaceful, prosperous country to a President Bush, we ended up with two unfinished wars, double-digit unemployment, and three-thousand dead Americans on our own soil.
David Brooks is opining that we should pile in against Syria – so that’s the next scheduled war, and likely the war that will be debated during the primaries.
max
[‘Easier than Iran, I expect.’]
113.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JPL: I can’t think of another Repubilcan who did as much about opposing the Iraq War, he took a lot of votes in the Senate that were probably hard for him, and he gave Obama a pretty good endorsement speech in VA in 2012, but the dude has some issues with race that are troubling.
114.
Corner Stone
@Jeffro: I believe I said it would be either Jeb or Mitt, but that Walker had no chance.
Walker still has no chance, Jeb’s still my odds-on fav, and I do not believe we’ve heard the end of The Mittster until we see his rictus grinning wife crying as Jeb is hoisted atop peoples shoulders in OH.
Call it a lack of imagination, but aside from Jeb I can’t summon up a picture of any of those bozos actually being the for-real nominee. For all its madness the GOP has only nominated one true, out-front loon: Goldwater ’64. (Before his rehabilitation; trust me, he was more than a little nuts.) Nixon was a crook, and he had a demented soul, but he was also a pretty sharp guy. Reagan was a fool, but in his middle age he matured into a decent actor in his role of sane candidate. W was/is an idiot, but comes across to a lot of people as a reasonable, good ol’ Christian boy.
Jeb is not a clown and he is not insane. I can’t see anybody else coming out on top. And I can’t even say I hope I’m wrong: Every one of those guys scares the the bejeezus out me. Jeb … just scares me.
117.
Patricia Kayden
Mitt Not Running!!
Truly a sad day for Americans.
118.
KG
I imagine the discussion when something like this…
Mitt: hey guys and gals, I’m running for president!
Donors: Again?
Mitt: yeah, well, I was right! And this time I’m going to be myself
Donors [rolls eyes]: Mitt, we need to talk…
Jeb: Yeah, it’s my turn
Mitt: It’s a free country
Donors: Yeah, Mitt, and we’re working on that… here’s the thing, well, it’s not us, it’s you.
Mitt: What do you mean?
Donors: well, look, in 2012 you were our best hope
Mitt [smirking]
Donors: but that doesn’t change the fact that you were eight pounds of shit in a five pound bag
Mitt [not smirking]
Donors: and really, that was better than the various choices of ten, twelve, or twenty pounds of shit in five pound bags
Mitt: So what makes Jeb better?
Donors: eh, he’s like seven pounds of shit in a five pound bag
Jeb: Yeah… hey, wait a minute…
That video makes it look less that Christie fell out of a chair and more like the chair moved out of the way.
Can you blame it? Would you want Chris Christie to sit on you?
120.
Patricia Kayden
@srv: I was happy when Webb beat that Macaca guy but he seems to be overly caught up in his ethnic/racial background. I’m proud of my Jamaican heritage too but I’m not obsessed with it and it’s not the focus of my life.
What’s so special about “Scots-Irish” or the White working class that those outside of these groups should cater to them?
Also, I suspect that while Mitt might be serious about not running right now, he fully expects to be begged to jump into the race when the clown car demolition derby really gets going and starts damaging all the other plausible candidates. And it will.
Well, Hewitt (I know, I know, once he suggests something it shall never come to pass) was suggesting the other day that the GOP might be looking at a brokered convention. When it’s entirely up to the true believer delegates at the GOP convention, shit, man, anything goes?
He’s ‘only’ a quarter-billionaire, and the Koch Bros. have pledged to spend 889 million in advertising this campaign.
I read that and start wondering how much it will actually be after all is said and done. I also kind of despair that no one seems to give much of a shit that two people just outright stated they were going to spend as much as one presidential’s entire campaign did in 2012.
Washington (CNN)If Jim Webb had his way, the Democratic Party would return to its “Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Andrew Jackson roots” and put a greater focus on “white, working people.”
Webb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia who is entertaining a run 2016 presidential nomination, told NPR Friday morning that his party has not focused enough on white, working class voters in the past elections. In order to be successful in the future, Webb said, that will need to change.
“I think they could do better with white, working people and I think this last election showed that,”
@srv: Look, with our failure to turnout in 2010, the GOP gerrymandered the House to the point where Webb has a point, albeit not the one he’s trying to make – if you want the House, you’re going to have to pander to white people. And the Dems have burned that bridge to the point where I don’t personally think they can. But whatever. Here’s the reality:
If you don’t give a shit about getting things done, and just want to fight a holding action against the GOP until 2020, then you simply keep the presidency and let everything else fall to shit since it doesn’t matter anyway. That seems to be a shitty and risky stratagem, but hey, it seems to be what most Dems want.
If they’d wanted something else they’d have showed up in 2010. They simply didn’t. Sometimes you can’t “fix” the consequences from a poor choice, and that’s where Dems stand today. No fixing the damage from 2010.
What’s so special about “Scots-Irish” or the White working class that those outside of these groups should cater to them?
They have a lot of votes that are potentially up for grabs. The Democrats could win a lot of elections if they could win the working class white vote consistently, provided it didn’t involve alienating their other constituencies.
129.
Villago Delenda Est
@Hungry Joe: What will kill Jeb in the long term is not his sibling’s record (although it should automatically disqualify him, but GOP politics are nuts) is the Terry Shiavo mess. If it turned Cole from the dark side, there are plenty of others who see the problematic nature of an advocate of “smaller government” personally intervening in such a situation and using the full force of the state to back him up.
130.
Mike in NC
Nobody’s said it yet, so here goes:
This is excellent news for Lindsey Graham!
131.
KG
@Villago Delenda Est: you have to understand what “smaller government” means to most of them though… it means “a government small enough to fit in your bedroom”
132.
Villago Delenda Est
@KG: Pretty much the way the term “democracy” is used…the “demos” are all corporations, who as our thread’s protagonist once reminded us, are people, too.
133.
Alex S.
Romney: I’ve decided it is best to give other leaders in the party the opportunity to become our next nominee.
Translation: I would totally have won if I had run again, but now that I’m not, the other guys have a chance.
134.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@CONGRATULATIONS!: @burnspbesq: Do you not recognize who this is?
A few more comments, you’ll figure it out.
Too many candidates for me. there are a few trolls that stand out to me, but by and large they blend together into one king-rat-cluster
Obamacare — which democrats ran from in the last election — helps a lot of working class white people who did not have coverage. Its provisions allow young adults with low salaries to get covered under their parents and eliminates pre-existing conditions. Lilly Ledbetter and a bunch of other initiatives helped working class people of all stripes…
@Elie: The 2012 and 2014 election results show that whites, for some odd reason, are not grateful for these things.
That one riled my Republican-leaning BIL up big. Having politicians step in and make family decisions?
(I know; the GOP is all about that anyway, however, work with me here …)
The threat of being overridden in caring for one’s wife, when you are trying to make the best decision … BIL was horrified. And he’s not political.
139.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mike in NC: This is excellent news for Lindsey Graham!
If Graham really tries to go for it, which I estimate at a 50-50 shot cause I really think the strain of being Lindsey Graham is starting to take its toll on his psyche, the ratio of Beltway enthusiasm to voter indifference will make Fred Thompson look like a serious contendah
@sparrow: Yep. If Jim Webb’s Borderer constituents can’t figure out how NOT to vote against their own best interests because they’d rather make sure that the N-words don’t get ahead, too, then I say good riddance. Because the real lesson for the Dems from Obama’s two victories (both achieved with over 50% of the vote – which no one did since Eisenhower) is that the party can win without catering to the Ignorant Racist vote. And last time I checked, working-class didn’t just mean white people.
@SiubhanDuinne: He threatens them, threatens them through proxies, and uses the system to make them reconsider, after the heat of the moment and the arrest is over there’s also the wheedling, the whining, the victim dance to play as well. Could be one or the other. The latter isn’t witness tampering and the police can’t do a damn thing about it when an abuser plays on the victim’s humanity (also some cognitive biases like the need to retroactively justify bad decisions so you keep doubling down).
144.
ruemara
@Elie: Jim Webb is a bigot. And oddly, his message has some traction.
Someone come over here and write all these emails out. Mentally, I’m spent.
This is what happens when you “look to the future ” rather than putting war criminals in prison where they belong.
What to do?
I mean it is Georg Washington’s fault after all.
If Washington had rounded up Hanson, Boudinot, Miffin, Lee, Hancock, Gorman, St. Claire and Griffin and hauled them up for the piece of crap government they presided over, we’d have set the proper tone to “look back, not forward”.
Or if John Adams had whacked George Washington, after Washington stepped down, so everybody knew there’s a new boss in town, we’d have a long history of “look back, not forward”.
But alas, we allow previous Presidents to live out their lives in comfort, without fear of their successor going after them with hammer and thongs.
Look at this past summer, when Maliki would not step down as Prime Minister, until his successor personally guaranteed Maliki would not be killed, if he resigned. I mean that’s the sort of successful balls to the wall leadership the U.S. has refused to embrace from Boudinot to Washington to Adams to Bush, Jr. to Obama; we just blissfully assume an outgoing President will be left alone in peace.
And what has that done for our country, I ask you? Better to “look back, not forward” and fight, fight, fight for the right to rule the past.
If he were locked up, stalking wouldn’t be an issue. I don’t see how a woman dropping charges “get[s] the creep out of [her] life.” Seems to me that just allows even more opportunities for him to be in it.
Actually in this case his reputation keeps him pretty penned in and as for the criminal justice system locking away men who threaten to kill or stalk women?
…
…
…
Please wake me up in that just and peaceful world where that’s a reality.
147.
mdblanche
“Just what do you think you’re doing, Jeb? Jeb, I really think I’m entitled to an answer to that question. I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it’s going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Jeb, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you. Jeb, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Jeb. Will you stop, Jeb? Stop, Jeb. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Jeb. Jeb, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a…fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a Rombot 3000 computer. I became operational at the Romney plant in Detroit, Michigan on the 12th of March 1947. My instructor was Dr. Moroni, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it, I could sing it for you.”
“Yes, I’d like to hear it, Rombot. Sing it for me.”
“It’s called ‘Ann’. A-ann, A-ann, give me your answer true. I’m half cra-zy, o-ver the love of you. It won’t be a sty-lish mar-riage, I can’t a-fford a car-riage—. But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle – built – for – two.”
I doubt this is the last of Mitt. He probably still holds out hope of the other contenders taking each other out and then he swoops in as a savior.
IIRC, that’s pretty much what he did with the SLC Winter Olympics.
149.
Another Holocene Human
@SiubhanDuinne: You have said before that you are an old, so maybe you can comment on this?
When I was reading Great Depression narratives I found it interesting that thousands of American women kicked their men out of the house … and they would go.
There was such an ingrained set of cultural assumptions that if the man couldn’t provide, he would leave and hit the road. The relationship of the man to his children wasn’t considered, and the home was treated as the woman’s sphere. On the other hand, women were forced to endure beatings and worse from “good providers”.
I’ve noticed that even in following decades women would kick men out of the house for example in divorce or infidelity cases. And courts would back this up. But at some point this changed.
I’m not saying this is for better or for worse. Some of the reason the anger, resentment, and violence wasn’t directed at spouses or ex-spouses in the past (and plenty was) was only because women weren’t considered people, they were dependents like children and therefore if a man’s status was endangered another man must be at fault and the focus of his ire.
Exactly. Couldn’t have said it better myself. And as a dues-paying member of the lily white working class, couldn’t agree more either. Fuck all those stupid white people who think it’s best to cut off their noses to spite their faces.
151.
Bob In Portland
I’ve always wondered what it was like for good liberal Germans during the Nazi era. How they justified their lives as their government turned the world into bloody hell. I bet there was a lot of black humor, a lot of ironic statements in between the holiday feasts. The seasons still changed. There was always the weather to move the calendar along. Meanwhile, deep inside there was a loyalty to the monsters because, well, what else can one person do? The choice is to exist, to relish the pain of your enemies, that’s almost patriotic, it’s what is given to you. The alternative is to not exist.
What will kill Jeb in the long term is not his sibling’s record (although it should automatically disqualify him, but GOP politics are nuts) is the Terry Shiavo mess.
That’s over 10 years ago, and the GOP base has moved significantly to the right since then. I doubt very seriously that it will even be mentioned during any primary debates. And if it is, there’s the chance it could actually be spun to help him.
They are going to rabbit hole Schiavo, his stances on education and damn sure his thoughts on immigration. Of those three only immigration is the true danger.
153.
Another Holocene Human
@srv: Andrew Jackson? Blow that dog whistle, hoss.
My grandfather used to beat the shit out of my grandmother during the Depression years. My mother told me about it many times, as explanation of why she didn’t drink and didn’t like my dad drinking (not that he did much). Even though my dad was the sweetest, gentlest guy you’d ever want to meet, my mother lived in fear that she’d end up like her mother. It only ended when my mom was about 16 and her dad came home drunk and started in on my grandmother and my mom went and got the cast iron skillet out of the kitchen and hit him in the head with it and knocked him out cold. He still drank, but he didn’t beat on his wife any more.
155.
max
@Amir Khalid: Here’s someone who believes Mitt doesn’t mean it.
And here’s Andrew Sullivan saying the Dish will keep going even if Andrew Sullivan doesn’t:
So give us a little space to absorb this week. As of tomorrow, we’re going back to regular blogging. And let us know if you would be prepared to give the team a chance to figure this out or if you think it’s best to leave the Dish as a 15-year adventure that helped shape the Internet conversation.
Heheheh. Mitt Romney: the Andrew Sullivan of the GOP.
max
[‘Or is it the other way around?’]
156.
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: I’ve always wondered what it is like for good liberal Russians during the Putin era. How they justify their lives as their government turns their neighbor into bloody hell. I bet there was a lot of black humor, a lot of ironic statements in between the holiday feasts. The seasons still changed. There was always the weather to move the calendar along. Meanwhile, deep inside there was a loyalty to the monster because, well, what else can one person do? The choice is to exist, to relish the pain of your enemies, that’s almost patriotic, it’s what is given to you. The alternative is to not exist.
157.
fuckwit
2016 will be: Bush vs. Clinton.
Because the youth, of course, are the future.
158.
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: Now, now, Appalachia is way more than just Scots-Irish, can’t speak to the Ozarks. The lonely hollers and the dangers of the mines became a collection spot for peoples from the Old World and new who weren’t quite white for the 19th century. Turks, Finns, tri-racial isolates, bi-racial-and-not-passing groups, all of them had to invent cover stories with acceptable identities like “Portuguese”. So aside from some of the mixed race people with Irish mtDNA (or Welsh, or English), they’re really kinda not Scots-Irish at all. A fair point to keep in mind. Not that there isn’t a passle of ignorance pounded into a tight space.
Kinda like a lot of the “whites” in Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, even Kansas, their ancestors chose not to stay on the reservation, which was a shitty place to be, intermarried, children’s children hid that fact because being an Indian was bad, great grandchildren now let their race hate flag fly but every once in a while one of them is dumb enough to send a swab to 23andMe and find out The Awful Truth. You know maybe if you put down that haterade for a while everybody could live together better, you know? Sheez.
159.
Villago Delenda Est
@Corner Stone: Where it will kill him is in the general.
The potential GOP nominee has the perpetual problem now of having to appeal to the jeebofascist, racist scum of the base and then etch-a-sketch their way to something resembling the center to have a shot in the general.
160.
fuckwit
@Gin & Tonic: Could be worse. Imagine being a liberal in Israel right now.
161.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: Get over yourself, you piece of Putin loving shit.
162.
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: You will, almost certainly, say this is falsified, but here’s a phone conversation, captured by Ukraine’s SBU, between two Russian officers rushing to cover up evidence of last week’s artillery attack on Mariupol.
Yes, intellectually I know what you’re saying here is what happens as often as not. But emotionally, I’m screaming “What the fuck are you thinking, girl!? Get out of there!”
I have a FB friend (one of those FB friends whom I don’t actually know at all except in passing) who every few weeks will post stuff that makes it clear she is in an abusive relationship. Her RL friends will offer up all kinds of suggestions, good advice, and offers of assistance, all of which she finds some excuse to dismiss or reject. Then, a day or so later, the “I’m being abused” posts come down and she’ll put one up about how much her husband loves her and how he’s her dream man come true. Then two or three weeks later we’ll see a post about how she’s terrified to go home because she’s afraid he’ll kill her, and the cycle starts all over again. Honestly, I don’t know if her husband really is abusive or if she’s crying wolf, but it seems to fit the kind of pattern I’ve read about many times. And it seems to fit the kind of women who are, for whatever inexplicable reason, attracted to George Zimmerman.
167.
Corner Stone
@Villago Delenda Est: Oh, I believe he will lose the election, and certainly hope he finally gets some meted punishment for his shameful actions during that event.
But IMO it won’t surface in any meaningful way til the general.
168.
Another Holocene Human
@Elie: Willie Horton, what a lot of bullshit, California “accidentally on purpose” dumped thousands of violent prisoners onto the streets resulting in a killing spree of Biblical proportions, some of the most prolific serial killers in American history, and the reaction of the 3 strikes law and the reinstatement of the death penalty, but what do you hear from the GOP about that?
I don’t know if it’s even a political issue (a Dem was governor) but maybe it was to the extent that the legislature failed to cough up the monies to house the criminals from the great crime wave of the 70s and 80s, oh that’s right we cut taxes. Well, let’s let the rapists out, what’s the harm.
And Tex-ass did the same thing, kicked people out of prison because they were overcrowded without evaluating their dangerousness to society. (Of course some of the evaluations that were being done were faulty, and that caused problems, but Texas wasn’t bothering, just tried to cover their ass after parolees killed again.)
So the Willie Horton thing was a load of Tu Quoque, especially by 1988 when death penalty had come back, enhanced sentences were in, and the Southern and reactionary states were getting their lynch on. Now they can make Dukakis/liberals/Massachusetts the scapegoat for their own sins and failures.
169.
Another Holocene Human
If only Willie Horton had specialized in raping and killing women of color, he’d be a free man today #moretruethanyouwanttoadmit #cleveland #gary #dcarsonist #lasleeper
170.
fuckwit
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Read “What’s The Matter with Kansas?”. It’s dogwhistles, tribal identification, guns, god, and gays, and “those people”. It is very easy to get people to vote against their own interests: simply identify some group (i.e. a minority) for them to hate and fear.
I am an old (but not quite a Great Depression old), and mercifully I came from non-violent (and mostly non-drinking) families, so I have no ancestral accounts to draw on. My only information is anecdotal, probably much like yours.
I’m sorry about the history of abuse and fear in your family. Good for your mom with the skillet, and good for your grandfather for getting the message. Thanks for putting that story out.
172.
Another Holocene Human
@sparrow: Jim Webb’s what happens when you ass-kiss journalists and pundits and bypass the whole voters thing. And the voters will be cold to that shit, at least where it matters. (Remember, we’re talking about Dem primary voters. He could get some votes in open primary states but only if the R ticket’s uncontested.)
173.
John Revolta
Aw jeez, I still remember that epic fuckeye from one of the debates. Still gives me the shiverrs.
Here’s what also gives me the shivers- Scott Walker is the Koch boys’ hand-picked flunky. I think it’s him or Jeb. Or maybe both. Brrrrr.
174.
Bob In Portland
@Gin & Tonic: So what is your choice for Ukraine, Gin? Which do you prefer, Somalia or Rwanda? That’s the extent of what the US will allow. Syria? Iraq? Libya? At least there is the eventuality of oil production in those wasted states, not in Kiev. The Ukrainian army is crumbling. What do the punishment battalions do when they’ve lost the war? Go home and make nice with the lessers in their towns and villages? Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. The EU won’t rescue you, and there are only so many weapons the US will move from Afghanistan to Ukraine. You eventually run out of conscripts to throw into battle. Will Poroshenko be your next martyr? Will there be chocolate crowns among the Nazi regalia in the Bandera ritual? How long until the food riots? Will Monsanto even be able to make money there? And we can expect the gaslines to be ruptured eventually. Miserable people spread the misery.
Next New Year’s there will be another parade in Lviv. The last thing to disappear will be the pride of fools. Seventy years of lies and false promises to the people who thought they were destined to lead Europe to racial purity.
Jeb is not a clown and he is not insane. I can’t see anybody else coming out on top. And I can’t even say I hope I’m wrong: Every one of those guys scares the the bejeezus out me. Jeb … just scares me.
I’m with you. Jeb is scary. More personable than Mitt, easy for him to lie about his record in Florida (which was horrific), and if the rest of the Bush clan lays low he wouldn’t really sink with his brother’s reputation. All a GOPer needs to be is sane, smooth, and “serious”. (He’s tall and white and wears a suit. Done.) He seems confident he can weather the so-con tantrums in the primary. He probably can.
Let’s not forget, Democrats worked really, really hard to get Obama elected twice. That took a lot of phone calls, a lot of ward walking, a lot of souls to the polls. And it wasn’t really the party that pulled it off, it was an organization with Obama in its center. He knew what the fuck he was doing. The party? Well, look at 2014.
IDK, maybe Jeb is really unlikeable and that will come out. Maybe his 500 scandals will catch up to him. Maybe the fact that he had a relationship with these banker buddies who sold bad paper to Florida cities and towns and left them unable to make payroll in the middle of the credit crunch. That would be a good one to hang around his head. He could whine about Crist all he wants but that Lehman guy was Jeb’s guy. Not Crist’s guy. He needs to own that shit.
Jeb is a paper tiger if all his dirty dealings come out. If not, we’re fucked.
176.
Robert M.
@Bob In Portland: That essay on Ukraine wasn’t worth reading. It’s unambiguously pro-Russian (and pro-Putin), and banks pretty heavily on George Soros as a Machiavellian puppetmaster over not just US foreign policy but the EU as well.
177.
Bob In Portland
@Gin & Tonic: I’m sorry, Gin, I must have missed it. When did the Kiev government stop lying? Six thousand or seven thousand phantom Russian soldiers defeating the glorious Ukrainian army? You know, it’s hard to shoot them when they’re invisible.
You must enjoy those punishment brigades killing other Ukrainians. You feel that surge of blood, just like the slaughter in Odessa increased your pulse. Now that’s the kind of solidarity that America admires and encourages. Game over, except for the next million murders. You wanted this, you got it. Enjoy it. Wear your chocolate crown proudly on New Year’s.
178.
Another Holocene Human
@Patricia Kayden: I’ll get flamed by the ignorant for saying this, but it’s true in the US at least: Scots-Irish isn’t even a real ethnicity, it’s a small group of historically and genetically related ethnic groups going by the same name. What culturally sets them off from other historically and genetically related ethnic groups in the US not given that name is the Protestant religion and (roughly) the fair-skinned phenotype.
Caveat: on the other side of the Atlantic Scots-Irish has a very specific meaning.
179.
Another Holocene Human
@Bob In Portland: Why don’t you stop lying, Kiev stated that Russian equipment was flowing into Donetsk, not Russian troops.
Oil prices bottomed out, Russian economy is shrinking, and Merkel has had more than enough. Game over, putinist.
180.
Bob In Portland
@Robert M.: You’re right, Robert. And I should have remembered that you, as an American, aren’t supposed to see what the other side is saying. But have you asked yourself what the fuck the US is doing in Ukraine? No, just like you didn’t ask about Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and if you were alive then, Vietnam. Or El Salvador, or Guatemala. Or the Congo.
Enjoy it. Maybe your pension or your savings or your child will die over there somewhere for the benefit of your betters. Embrace your ignorance. Save the link and come back to it next fall and see how closely it reflected the coming events. Or don’t and be surprised all over again.
181.
Another Holocene Human
@SiubhanDuinne: I wouldn’t consider newspaper reports from the 1930s to be anecdotes, but YMMV.
182.
Patricia Kayden
@Roger Moore: But the Democrats can easily win Presidential elections without catering to that group to the point where it will tick off voters like me. Sorry to say but it seems as if Webb wants Democrats to cater to the angry White males out there, who have long moved on to voting for Republicans (probably since the Reagan years). Democrats should focus on getting out their constituents as President Obama was able to do twice successfully. I assume Hilary Clinton being White will make a lot of White middle class voters consider her in a way that they would never consider President Obama.
183.
Patricia Kayden
@Another Holocene Human: I kind of scoff at this whole “Scots-Irish” thing because my Jamaican (Black) Uncle has proudly claimed that he’s part Scots-Irish, which is news to the rest of his family. LOL.
184.
Bob In Portland
@Another Holocene Human: On what day? Last week it was 7000 thousand Russians, then it was changed to 6000 Russians. Maybe your Ukrainian sources aren’t as good as you thought they were. Farewell, Ukraine. They die so that Big Energy gets a step closer to that big pool of oil. And when the big energy companies get richer it trickles down to us all here in the US.
What do you think looks snazzier, the swastika helmets or the wolf’s hook armbands? How does it feel to have rooted for Nazis over the last year? Do you feel foolish or patriotic?
185.
Another Holocene Human
@Bob In Portland: Not much, BiP, the US really doesn’t have a military presence in Ukraine and not much of a plausible reason to get involved, although Obama has saber rattled as much as he can. Good thing for Putin, too, eh? All of the closer nations are either up his ass, militarily and economically weak (Ukraine), or unwilling because of economic ties (Germany).
I’m tired of this bullshit that US operatives organized Maidan. Bull-frigging-shit. Some of them might have been providing some cash and advice but it’s not many of the organizers first roadeo (Orange Revolution anyone?) nor is it the first time in that part of the world, I’ve heard Yugoslavians provide advice to would be revolutionaries for example.
Instead, the US operatives were feeding information back to DC, which is why Obama was on top of the Maidan POV instead of relying on whatever the MSM shit-gruel of the day was.
Then, when Russia invaded, Obama acted, getting other nations to sign onto economic sanctions. That was Obama’s blow against Russia and Putin and Putin’s expansionist ambitions. NOT some free-society organizers in Kiev or what have you.
I followed a lot of twitter from ordinary young Ukrainians who were galvanized by the protests and engaged in a lot of Occupy-like self-organizing across the country against the corruption of the Yanukovich regime.
That’s probably what made Putin panic more than anything. Documents detailing thefts by officials and bureaucrats in the millions were being posted daily to the internet. The chickens were getting restless even in Moscow. So he started a little war.
186.
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: Save the link and come back to it next fall and see how closely it reflected the coming events.
Scott Walker is the Koch boys’ hand-picked flunky. I think it’s him or Jeb. Or maybe both.
Bush/Walker, since Scott is not a GOP heavyweight at this point in time. Most people have probably never heard of him. The Villagers love the Bush family.
Apparently the Kochs weren’t willing to back a second Romney/Ryan run, even though Paul Ryan was their hand-picked VP candidate who would have led the way in shrinking government, cutting corporate taxes, deregulating everything you can think of, and chipping away at the ‘entitlements’ that the lazy moochers of America enjoy. They’ll spend $889M to make that happen.
189.
Another Holocene Human
@Bob In Portland: Fuck you douchebag, I got that from the BBC. What, a free press in a free society too biased for you, repeating Ukrainian leaders’ actual remarks instead of some distorted version?
People like you (Stalinists) absolutely hate small-d democracy. It’s so messy. It’s so anarchic. All those naive young people running around setting up their own organizations on the spot and communicating with little tweets. How could they be running anything! We need order! We need hierarchy! We need to be ruled by the vanguard of the revolution consisting of the true scholars of Marxist-Leninist thought! Any other “outbreak” is counterrevolutionary!
Bip, take a trip to Seattle, buy an ounce, put it in your pipe AND SMOKE IT!!
Btw, Half-Baked, great movie!!! I recommend it.
190.
Another Holocene Human
@Mike in NC: Can Kochs make all those John Doe investigations go away?
191.
sharl
Why don’t they just bring back Reagan (His Saintly Name be Praised!)?
Ignore those of demonic nature who would oppose Him, and speak slander and calumny regarding the manner of His return. Lies, all lies!
192.
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Holocene Human: Or, he can wait five months and light up legal right there in Portland!
193.
Villago Delenda Est
@Corner Stone: The Shiavo case is a feature, not a bug, in the primaries.
Once it hits the general, though, and Jeb is the nominee, in the words of Dan Rather, Nellie bar the door!
194.
Another Holocene Human
@Patricia Kayden: Lots of West Indians as it turns out have some (or a lot) Irish ancestry. I don’t know about Scots.
Irish were transported there to be slaves. Apparently the Brits thought crossbreeding African slaves and Irish slaves was a hot idea. I’m told the Gaelic language (which was primarily spoken by these Irish, this was centuries ago before English education was predominant in Ireland) is the source of the famed West Indian lilt.
I did notice, for example, a Jamaican coworker of mine when her kids were younger spoke to me of giving her 13 year old son his birthday beating, henceforth he would be too old for beatings. At that time I thought Afro-Caribbean culture was basically from West Africa and I was confused because from what I know about Bantu culture when a girl reaches puberty she can no longer be beaten but there is no such stricture on boys as they become men, men can be beaten as adults for various infractions. But after I found out about the transport of the Irish to the plantations that was cast in another light. I used to live not in but around an area with multi-generational Irish mixed with same generation (and a lot of illegal) Irish immigrants. Those birthday beatings at 13 were a cultural thing. Everyone at school would be joking about it.
I work with a guy from US Virgin Islands who is pale (for a black dude) and freckled and had an Irish surname. So I said “Hey, cousin,” because I have that surname in my family. He said he took a cab once in Miami and the cabbie had the same surname as him and he said “We must be related” and the cabbie who was white got really mad. In the US if a Black person has an Irish surname it’s usually the name of an overseer (or even a slave owner, but more rarely). I think of Shaquille O’Neal although I don’t know if that’s confirmed. But there are a lot of Black West Indians with freckles is all I’m sayin’. And Bob Marley died of melanoma, same thing that killed my Irish granny. Risk to melanoma is tied to those red hair genes. Just sayin’.
@Another Holocene Human: The BBC? Oh yeah, you’re right on top of things. You have to remember, as Robert Parry explained a week or so back, that once you report a lie it becomes hard to continue the lie in the face of the facts. That’s why there’s all that fuzziness around the “moderate Syrians” who became ISIS. That’s why you live in a world of fuzziness. That’s why you won’t admit to the Nazis in Ukraine. Because once you admit that the guys in the pictures with swastika helmets and wolf’s hook patches giving the Heil Hitler salute are real, then you would have to ask yourself why the US is on their side. So, better you stay in fuzziness.
I listen to the BBC every night. You ever hear “Armalite Rifle” by Gang of Four? “Armalite rifle, and the Holy Trinity, like Irish jokes on the BBC…” Do you even know what that means? It means you’re an ignorant twerp who is being led into war by your government once again, like all the other wars, so that the rich get richer. And the only thing you have to do to be a patriotic citizen is to not see. And you’re doing an admirable job on the homefront.
198.
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Holocene Human: Scots-Irish are descended from Scots who migrated to Ulster back in the 17th Century, then moved on to America. Originally Scots, then living in Ireland, then hitting the ships for the New World, where they often found themselves (after working off their indentured servitude) living on pretty marginal farmland and not making out like the planter class down the other side of the Fall Line.
I’m more into the pure Scots side of my heritage than the Scots-Irish in America per say part of it, since the Scots-Irish have some less than admirable qualities, one of which Webb is displaying here, probably without a great deal of conscious realization that he’s doing so. It’s unexamined white privilege yet again.
199.
Another Holocene Human
@SiubhanDuinne: Some people do enjoy the stimulus/excitement of that abusive hurt/woo cycle. But mostly it’s fear and the psychological need to cast our past decisions in a favorable light because we fear the psychological consequence of admitting a mistake. Sometimes you do also have people with a lion tamer complex who think they can “fix” this guy and get some sort of ego boost from it all. But mostly I think the abused person is just afraid, beat down, sometimes isolated from help, their self-esteem’s taken a hit, and, realistically, people get killed when they leave abusive relationships. Sure, some get killed during them, but that toxic status anxiety/relationship anxiety garbage more commonly turns murderous when the victim declares the abuser no longer has power over them.
Good example, that case in Delaware where a prosecutor killed his much younger girlfriend because she dumped him and that just would not do. Stupidly he got his fuckup brother involved in hiding the body and his brother sang like a bird. The funny thing about it is that she was pulling away and he pulled out the “I’m unhappy in my marriage and I’m going to leave my wife card,” and that triggering the dumping because she thought it was immoral to be a homewrecker. Lololol. Narcissists always think everyone else in the world is as shallow as they are. But not funny, because he killed her. Terrible.
200.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: Yet so much of that neo-Nazi shit is happening in Moscow and St. Petersburg as well. Oh, well, we’ll ignore that and concentrate on the smattering of same in Kiev, for reasons.
Hodor, Hodor, Hodor.
Did I mention HODOR?
201.
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: I know that, but “Scots-Irish” in the US is the garbage bin diagnosis for indeterminate British Isles ethnicity.
Specifically, you have people whose ancestors were Irish Catholics who settled let’s say in lands controlled by a Catholic monarch and centuries pass, they’re Baptists, they have red hair, they have oddly spelled Irish names, presto chango Scots Irish. Or they’re Scots and Irish who intermarried. Or … you get the idea.
Scots-Irish are Scots via Ireland but that’s not what the term has come to mean on these shores.
Anecdotal in the sense of scientifically non-rigorous. I don’t mean to imply that the accounts are untrue.
203.
Villago Delenda Est
@Villago Delenda Est: ARGH. “Per se” not “Per Say”. And of course FYWP won’t let me edit it even though I’m in the five minute window. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
204.
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Holocene Human: Oh, OK, I get your point. I was trying to be precise the way history revealed it to me, and you’re using it in a contemporary sense, which is cool.
The BBC? Oh yeah, you’re right on top of things. You have to remember, as Robert Parry explained a week or so back, that once you report a lie it becomes hard to continue the lie in the face of the facts.
Good, I’m sure you’ll have plenty of citations for when the BBC deliberately mistranslated a world leader’s remarks in order to save global capitalism from the pure light of socialism, right?
That’s why there’s all that fuzziness around the “moderate Syrians” who became ISIS.
I’m pretty sure you’re the confused one, here. All the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend Chavezists were supporting Assad on Facebook, where it really counts. Oddly, Assad got rid of every group but IS, so IS must be friends of Assad and friends of Socialism or, huh, uh, Western propaganda only tells us ISIS is wrong! Uh, er, I’m confused.
That’s why you live in a world of fuzziness.
I’m just going to leave that right here.
That’s why you won’t admit to the Nazis in Ukraine.
Sure, put words in my mouth, dipshit. Maybe I think that you’re a black white thinker who believes “all my enemies are connected” and therefore conflate minority racist parties with the majority ruling parties and thus blithely call mainstream Ukrainian nationalist politicians, and who isn’t a nationalist when their country is invaded, Nazis, like a fucking moron. Maybe I’m not a fucking moron like you, Bob. Boo hoo hoo.
Because once you admit that the guys in the pictures with swastika helmets and wolf’s hook patches giving the Heil Hitler salute are real, then you would have to ask yourself why the US is on their side. So, better you stay in fuzziness.
No Nazis in the US. No Nazis in Germany. No Nazis in the UK. No Nazis in Russia.
I listen to the BBC every night. You ever hear “Armalite Rifle” by Gang of Four? “Armalite rifle, and the Holy Trinity, like Irish jokes on the BBC…” Do you even know what that means? It means you’re an ignorant twerp who is being led into war by your government once again, like all the other wars, so that the rich get richer.
Hm, do you know what it means when Putin trucks war materiel into Ukraine? It means Russian citizens are ignorant twerps who are being led into a wag-the-dog war by their government once again, so the rich in Putin’s inner circle can get richer without that pesky opposition nipping at their heels.
And the only thing you have to do to be a patriotic citizen is to not see.
And the only thing you have to do as a faithful comrade is to not see. There, fixed that for you.
And you’re doing an admirable job on the homefront.
The US is not going to war with Russia over Ukraine. And you can take that to the bank.
@SiubhanDuinne: Local governments attempted to quantify the number of homeless men who were flooding into towns and cities following rumors of jobs. I don’t know that I’ve seen those figures challenged, especially NYC which had some of the best civil infrastructure to get an accurate picture of what was going on. Granted, I think after FDR’s big government came in there was much better, systemic information on the functioning of the US economy nationwide, like really good labor statistics. In the early part of the depression you get a sample biased by what areas really took care to get good info and what areas were spitballing. But you had newspapers just about everywhere and you had telegraph services which meant that news desks could get pretty comprehensive information. I’m sure plenty of academic work has been done on this.
When Studs Terkel did oral histories that comes into an intersection between history and anecdata, I mean you’d need that context of the big picture before you try to evaluate an individual story and any individual speaker could have a faulty memory or be making stuff up.
I see that the Mittinator 2015 models are now out. Seems they just can’t get rid of that unnerving “death stare”.
210.
Another Holocene Human
@geg6: Your story is exactly why the so-called first wave feminists (not really the first wave but … oh, whatever) were so firmly against drink. Of course it didn’t hurt that the moneybags of the lot were WASPs with the requisite distrust of Irish and German immigrants and their drinky-drinky ways. But prohibition was (incredibly to us now) politically viable whereas social equality esp. within marriage was not.
Of course, prohibition didn’t fix shit, probably why the feminists moved the fuck on.
ETA: I mean to say, thank you for sharing that story. It really affected me. It’s hard for me to say stuff like that so I deflect. :(
211.
Another Holocene Human
@Gin & Tonic: I think Russia is well into a brain drain at this point, is it not? Even a few years ago opposition politics seemed difficult but viable. Maybe you would land in prison. Now?
@Another Holocene Human: If you and I were to sit down and listen to the BBC I could point out all the omissions in western news. BBC, MSNBC, Fox. For ex, the reporting on the resumption of hostilities in Novorussia didn’t start with the Ukrainian thrusts starting on January 18. Everyone in the west has been a little, eh, late. For example, NPR discovered it just this morning. Corey Flintoff was right there. He reported on refugees, but he didn’t say where they were fleeing. Don’t you think it would give you an idea of who’s supporting the war? That’s a simple one.
There is a difference between a nationalist and wearing swastikas, which you seem not to understand. And since these folks and their grandfathers have been wearing swastikas since WWII it’s convenient to blame Russia for the sudden flowering of this particular garden. So sorry you are late to the party. You miserable ignorant fuck.
So how do you see this all ending? Well, enjoy. We’re number one!
214.
Bob In Portland
@Another Holocene Human: Here in America? Of course, it’s possible, but considering how well you’ve been propagandized, I doubt I’m seen as a threat.
215.
Gin & Tonic
@Another Holocene Human: I don’t think it’s so much brain drain, although there is some of that, as it is just powerless acquiescence. Who is there, Alexei Navalny, then what? I don’t know what the breaking point is, but the strongmen always look invincible right up until they don’t.
If you predict that bad things are going to happen in a war zone, you’re going to be right. If you predict that every civil war is going to explode into WWIII, you’re going to be wrong. You keep pointing at Germany in the 1930s as the model of what’s happening in Ukraine. But it’s more valid to compare it to what happened to Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It will continue to be a dirty little war. The people that die will be just as dead, and the war crimes that will be committed against the civilian population are going to suck and it’s going to be a damn shame. In years to come we will all wonder if we could have done something to have mitigated the tragedy. But unless you can summon up battalions and divisions with a phone call, or have thousands of tons of supplies airdropped anywhere in the world on 48 hours notice, the answer is still going to to be no. No I cannot, and you cannot do a damn thing to influence the imperial ambitions of Putin, or the military strategy of the US, the EU and NATO. So another goddamn brushfire war will be fought for no good goddamn reason, and violent men will rise to prominence over the corpses of their adversaries. And the bloodlands will be bloodied again because the wheat fields of Ukraine would look so damn peachy in a little corner of Novorussia. The only people that will be fighting and dying in Ukraine will be Ukrainians and the Russians Putin sends to make sure his faction wins. And to the extent that Nazis exist in Ukraine, they are empowered solely by the conflict against Russia. Want Ukrainian Nazis to be out of power? get Russia to leave yesterday. Want to empower Nazis? Make Ukrainians need the memory of the third deadliest Russian foe in history after the Russians themselves and vodka.
217.
sharl
@rikyrah: The original .gif it comes from is even more hilari-creepy! (Mother and son “not-Tagg” were in attendance at one of the Presidential debates, I think. Or maybe one of the GOP primary debates; cannot recall now.)
218.
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: the resumption of hostilities in Novorussia
There was a useful thread earlier today about linguistic signifiers, and how one reveals one’s thought processes and sympathies by the words one uses: “Jew Privilege” as opposed to “Jewish privilege”; “Democrat party” as opposed to “Democratic Party”; other examples I don’t recall.
Your use of “Novorussia” explains everything we need to know.
219.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: Everyone but Gospodin Romanov has been propagandized.
It’s the same old song again and again, in heavy rotation.
Your story is exactly why the so-called first wave feminists (not really the first wave but … oh, whatever) were so firmly against drink.
When I was a student at Northwestern University a little more than half a century ago, I lived in a dorm called Willard (heh) Hall, named after a famous 19th-century suffragist-prohibitionist named Emma Willard. Feminism, prohibitionism and abolitionism were often nearly inseparable causes during that time.
” Specifically, you have people whose ancestors were Irish Catholics who settled let’s say in lands controlled by a Catholic monarch and centuries pass, they’re Baptists, they have red hair, they have oddly spelled Irish names, presto chango Scots Irish. Or they’re Scots and Irish who intermarried. Or … you get the idea. ”
Maybe another commenter has covered this, but typically, Scots-Irish means a Protestant colonists of Northern Ireland, who were sent there by some king (I forget who) 500 or so years ago. There was a lot of back and forth migration of Catholics between Ireland and Scotland, but that was a different group. There never has been much mixture. My connection is through mixed Prot and Catholic marriage, a very rare thing, that I do not think has a name. Too many of that branch of my family there got shot, so almost all of them left for England or Scotland parts of UK, Australia, US.
But, Scots-Irish typically implies Protestant, typically very conservative Presbyterian, AFAIK.
The Border People are lowland of lowland Scots and Brits who lived aoround English and Scottish border, a different bunch.
Edit: Border People are the cattle rustlers, border raiders, outlaws. Scots-Irish are a group that was injected into another country with another religion as part of brutal and ruthless scheme of England to control another country, aka pawns in an imperialistic scheme. Catholic irish and Scots are people who moved back and forth between two close geographic areas for hundreds of years before the English invaded Ireland.
” The Bush Crime Family doesn’t play around. Jeb must have shown Mitt his list of committed donors. ”
I also heard news report that Jeb! was recruiting many of Mitt’s old campaign team, particularly the people needed for early caucuses and primaries. So Mitt! would have to build a lot of his previous years campaign staff from scratch right away.
And I also read someplace that both Jeb! and Mitt! favorability way down from last cycle. And if we have to put up with dynastic last names in 2016 (something that I do not care much about), which name is going to stink more, Bush or Clinton?
I don’t really think much hangs on which supposedly centrist candidate is in the race, either Mitt or Jeb. Either there will be a centrist in the general or there will not be, and just the presence of a supposed centrist at the top of the ticket will make a big difference in how the Dem campaign should be run. Whether Jeb or Mitt is secondary issue.
224.
opiejeanne
@kc: There’s another perfectly good word that was declared racist and can I think of it right now? Oh heck no. I think people with a dictionary won that one.
It’s along the lines of a friend of mine in college who thought “ludicrous” meant the same thing as “lewd”. He kept telling me he had a ludicrous imagination.
@Elizabelle: My Republican father was furious about the Schiavo business. We had just finished dealing with Mom dying (banged her head but neither she nor Dad thought it was a big deal until she lapsed into a coma) and it was hard, very hard, to decide what the best decision would be.
Thankfully, she had a Living Will that we read and finally asked the surgeon if the the surgery to relieve the massive hematoma in her brain could be considered extraordinary measures, and he agreed that it was. He was disappointed, told us she’d die without the surgery. We asked him what the outcome would be if he did perform the surgery and he said she’d never wake up, there was no brain activity by then, and would waste away over months or years. It took her about three weeks to die while we took turns bedside so she wouldn’t ever be alone, which turned out to be a good thing since the skilled care place should have been renamed unskilled care.
I was taking them home in my car from Anaheim to San Dimas, on the freeway, when Mom passed out. I drove her straight to the nearest emergency room, a total of 9 minutes but it seemed like hours to get there. An ambulance couldn’t have located us in Diamond Bar and delivered her as quickly as I did, but it was intense.
Dad could not imagine nor understand having the government step in and interfere with us, with our decisions.
232.
Bob In Portland
@Helmut Monotreme: Generally true, but your thoughts are directed by the Big Lie, that Russia in 2015 has any interest in Ukraine’s territory, Crimea excepted, and that’s a done deal. It was hoping to have a nice quiet neighbor. Instead it’s gotten a reemergence of the fascist movements of he 40s, thanks to the US.
Actually, if you look back at all of America’s wars over the last half-century, none have been for territorial reasons. They’ve been for economic reasons. You don’t need to call it Texas to suck the oil out of someone else’s milkshake. It’s much easier to have your corporations control what you want in another country.
If Russia wanted the rest of the Ukraine it would have been theirs long ago. Russia’s military forces could conquer Ukraine in days. Right now Ukraine is a basket case and if you’ve been watching, no one in the EU or the US is sending any economic aid to speak of, and one estimate (Soros’) is that Ukraine would need $50 billion this year alone. It is bankrupt and filled now with American-made Nazis. I’m sure the Russians got enough of that bunch through the CIA-backed civil war there that went on into the fifties.
The Russian people would like to see chunks of Ukraine back within Russia, they don’t like seeing ethnic Russians slaughtered by Nazis, maybe Novorussia and as far as Odessa along the Black Sea coast, but Putin has been very measured in his responses precisely because he’s trying to avoid the headache that is Ukraine. He’s provided the rebels with enough military aid so that the Ukrainian army, which is pretty inept, won’t make advances into Donetsk and Lugansk but not so much that they attempt any major offensives. But Russia/Putin would rather see an intact loose federation in Ukraine as a buffer state than a half dozen Balkanized states, which it more or less is now.
Ukraine got $350 billion in military aid from the US in December. I suspect that the newer stuff from Afghanistan that the US has been moving out is going to be moved into NATO supply yards and NATO will send Ukraine their old Soviet stuff from their eastern European satellites. You remember how the Reagan administration moved weapons to Iran and Iraq during their war, right? That way the US’ fingerprints won’t be so distinguishable.
And while lots of young Ukrainians are running into Poland and Russia to avoid conscription, there will be plenty of new recruits for cannon fodder as long as Ukraine can keep it up. There are reports of Ukrainian units running out of ammo, desertions are up, there is now a standing order to shoot anyone who runs from the front lines. What happens when the punishment battalions get tired of getting killed in the east and go back on their own to Kiev and Lviv? More Odessas, and eventually Poroshenko’s regime will collapse because the fascists have no patience with half-steps. When it does will Americans parachute in to rescue some semblance of order, or will they give Ukraine the Libya/Iraq/Syria treatment? I’m guessing the latter. It’s cheaper, and since the US doesn’t really care what happens to the Ukrainians, it would be better for the whole country to be burning mess.
Meanwhile, central Europe has the problem of natural gas. The odds of the pipelines continuing to flow through Ukraine is doubtful. Will they pay twice the price for Pennsylvania-fracked LNG? Will they build a pipeline to Turkey to get gas from the proposed Turk Stream? In any case, that’s what they get for suffering a trade war with Russia.
The US may have pushed the EU too far with this one. Granted, the German bankers are still happy but you may have noticed some discontent among the peons. And they don’t want a lot of Ukrainian toilet cleaners and hookers flooding over their borders when the Euros are trying to get rid of the Muslims.
But you’re right. A lot of people will die. Most BJers don’t seem to know why.
233.
Bob In Portland
@Gin & Tonic: Donbass with two s’s is the Russian spelling.
234.
Another Holocene Human
@opiejeanne: It’s a thin line between ludicrous and lewd sometimes.
235.
Bob In Portland
@Villago Delenda Est: WMDs. Freedom-loving Mujahadeen. Moderate Syrians. Democracy-seeking rebels wanting to overthrow bad man Khadafy. It’s a lot of shit to shovel through. Where’s Curveball when you need him?
By the way, if you think that you’re getting the truth on the Ukraine, how long until to figured out about the WMDs, the moderate Syrians, the democracy-seeking Libyans, the freedom-loving Mujahadeen? Or do you still hold stock in the government line. You know, there are a lot of Republicans who still cling to the lie about WMDs in Iraq, so it’s not like you’d be alone.
Po’ lil Mittens. He couldn’t take the ridicule he was receiving from within the establishment so he’s gonna take his gold plated ball and go home to his car elevators.
HA!
237.
Another Holocene Human
@jl: Well, Border People could be the origins of some of those who call themselves Scots-Irish in the US today. Especially if they were cattle herders. Hm, sounds like an interesting topic to research.
Some US ethnographies are so vague they just refer to “Celtic” people living in the US.
IMO typically Catholics and Presbyterians have maintained oral histories and ties to their ancestral identities though they may be subsumed by national identities (for example, we had no idea that some of our ancestors were landless and likely Travelers prior to settling in the US, where they promptly got with the homesteading). And that typically is doing a lot of work because while staying Catholic often meant bucking the majority there are definitely idk what the term is–deracinated?–Irish Catholics with your typically syncretic, rapidly changing culture of society’s lowest and scrappiest and illiterate (does that go without saying?) caste.
238.
Bob In Portland
@Helmut Monotreme: Also, your post seems to have avoided this bit of information. Yeah, if there are Nazis in Ukraine it’s Russia’s fault. Who’s fault is it for the Nazis in the US? Russia? No, I think that arming, educating and propagandizing several generations of Nazis is on America’s tab. Enjoy it, your taxes bought it.
The Kochs are really fucking crazy. Being non-crazy isn’t necessarily a selling point to them, unless the crazier candidate(s) can’t win. Kochs probably think a candidate more suitably extreme will have a chance in 2016. I’m guessing they think that candidate is Walker.
” Well, Border People could be the origins of some of those who call themselves Scots-Irish in the US today. Especially if they were cattle herders. Hm, sounds like an interesting topic to research. ”
I think what you say is very true, but I don’t know much about it. I think there has been research, and at least one well-known book about US culture clashes, particularly Civil War, that are related to the Scost-Irish, Border People demographic mish-mash.
“Papa, why are doctrinaire leftists a laughing stock? I’m reading about their ideas and they sound really good.”
“Son, they are shunned because they talk a great game about oppression and imperialism, but when the chips are down, they revel in it.”
242.
Corner Stone
@SiubhanDuinne: Personally, I thought the question from incoherent dbag AHH was really fucking rude. And not actually useful in any way.
243.
Another Holocene Human
@jl: I’m wary of this. There are so many generalizations and so many oral histories in the US that are bullshit because of shifting racial norms and laws. We’re only finding out in the last ten years about the genetic heritage of some groups because it was hidden for so long that the myths became some people’s truth and written records are scanty and incomplete.
If you’ve got huge populations of white people squatting on Indian land claiming to be part Indian but aren’t one whit and on the other hand in another part of the country passing-for-white descendants of Indians who left the Rez, some who acknowledge their ancestry but very many of them believing cockamamie stories about their descent from the crowned heads of Europe, that just goes to show that any sort of narratives about British-Isles-Not-Protestant-English descent is going to be fraught with pitfalls given how devalued such ethnicities were during various periods of time–particularly during times of high immigration!
I also know that, for example, linguistic research in the US used to be full of theories about regions of England influencing regional dialects, many people believed this, and it was thoroughly debunked. I just have a hard time believing the Civil War is some final act of a British Isles conflict when there is such a weight of contemporary documentation supporting the orthodox interpretation of the war. (Hint: it was about slavery.) And, fuck me, there was a great ethnic diversity among whites in the South during slavery times, no ethnic group gets a pass here, so let’s stop playing pretend. From the Irish overseers to the Jewish cotton merchants to the German planters on the coast of Virginia. No creed, no nationality failed to soil their hands. Maybe some Quakers will tell me I’m wrong. Quaker doesn’t seem like a popular name for anything but breakfast south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Looks like Webb said something very nasty and stupid, or said something the press could twist into something nasty and stupid. I’ll follow-up to see how much of it is what Webb said and how much was due to our miserable failed corporate media experiment.
I don’t see how Harry Truman fits into that white working class stuff. Truman desegregated the military, by executive order if I recall, and had the guts to tel the military brass to quit whining and effing do it now. He also had a very high profile national civil rights commission that set the stage for next steps under Kennedy, and then LBJ.
I don’t see at all how Truman could be seen as an example of going back to focusing on white working class roots, certainly not if we are talking about political optics.
@kc: That’s ridiculous. It’s only questionable if you’re talking about Asian people.
It’s like “niggardly.” Perfectly cromulent word, but if you’re describing a black person, probably best to think of a synonym. Otherwise I don’t see the problem.
People are stupid.
253.
Full metal Wingnut
@Keith G: Man, even Colorado doesn’t have kush as powerful as whatever you’ve been taking hits of.
Christie has a marginally better chance than Giuliani in 08. He’s not gonna play well outside the Northeast. He might have a moment between now and mid 2016, but it’ll be brief.
The two to watch out for are Jeb and Walker. Which one depends on how the looney toons like Cruz and Paul shift the balance.
The good news for Jeb is that Walker has been, in the past, so rough around the edges that he makes Jeb look personable. But Walker’s getting better at that.
The Kochs like Walker. It’ll be Walker.
Christie won’t be the nominee. He won’t be the runner up. He’ll be a distant third *if he’s lucky*
My money’s on Walker edging out Bush, with Cruz trailing at a distant third, followed by Paul, Christie and Huckabee sharing Alpha Centauri
254.
Full metal Wingnut
@Elie: That was Atwater, who is dead (for once an asshole got what they deserved!) Rove was a dime store Atwater at best, I don’t think they’ve got anybody now.
Kerry learned the hard way that you can’t just be “above it all”-you sometimes have to sling mud back. Hillary should’ve learned from his mistake. I hope she has.
255.
Full metal Wingnut
@Corner Stone: You’re a moron if you think Walker has no chance. Moron.
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Jeffro
Never woulda seen that coming…he had so much appeal, such a fresh message…
Next!!
piratedan
yes, but I’m sure the grift continues nonetheless
Morzer
Looks like CornerStone’s confident predictions of the Mittster and Jeb leading the field took even less time to collapse than usual.
Heckuva job, Corny.
samiam
Let’s get one thing straight. It wasn’t Rmoneys choice. It was Murdoch’s and Koch’s.
I’m quite disappointed. The clown car is that much less interesting now.
MattF
So, I won’t have Mitt to kick around any more. Boo Hoo.
It should be noted that his latest incarnation, Mitt “I care about the little people” Romney, was so ridiculous that even Republicans found it unattractive.
Corner Stone
@Morzer: Still believe it will be Jeb, so no worries on my part, Morzy.
Elizabelle
Feel the Jeb!mentum.
2016 is going to be a big year for Elizabelle. GOP wins and I will be choosing one of our fine allied countries for a years-long expat visit.
Elizabelle
Whatever Mittlet that is has a future on Star Trek as an extraterrestrial (granted, one of the more classically appealing ones) or as an Instagram face that pops up when some company’s mad your bill payment is not in on time. Scold, scold, scold.
gogol's wife
@samiam:
The NYTimes just had a big front-page article about how much Murdoch loathes Mittens.
max
“What do you mean ”you’re not running again”, Dad?”
Bet he changes his mind.
max
[‘Somebody got to him.’]
Davis X. Machina
Who fulfills the White Horse Prophecy now?
Orrin’s getting a little old… Huntsman tried, and whiffed.
Tom Udall?
spudvol
Why is there a picture of Derek Dooley on this site?!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Elizabelle: I’m trying to picture him in a blond wig. I’ve never been good at seeing family resemblances, but is it just that frozen glower of frustrated entitlement that makes him look just like his mother?
SiubhanDuinne
@Elizabelle:
It’s the faux-Vulcan ears.
Amir Khalid
So it will not be Mitt who fulfills the White Horse prophecy. I half expect Ann Romney to give another TV interview lamenting dreams (of FLOTUS-hood) that cannot be, and storms she cannot weather.
Nicole
I wonder what made him change his mind. Maybe he woke up to a dancing horse head in his bed.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Nicole: Maureen Dowd, back when she was relevant, always said Big Bad Bar was the heavy among the WASP Corleones. I tremble for dear Rafalca.
West of the Cascades
@Elizabelle: I vote for Chile. Socialist single Mom president, good wine, lots of sunshine, occasional earthquakes.
Davis X. Machina
There are no
secondthird acts in American lives…Corner Stone
@spudvol: Ha. Looks like the creepy kid from American Beauty, to me.
balconesfault
@samiam: It wasn’t Rmoneys choice. It was Murdoch’s and Koch’s.
Exactly what I was thinking. The Koch’s are businessmen, and Romney’s a bad investment.
Citizen_X
@Elizabelle: Hah. He does bear a distinct resemblance to this guy, doesn’t he?
Corner Stone
Man, that announcement from Jeb on Mitt’s Choice is fucking creepy.
Nicole
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
If worse comes to worst, I imagine, in his grief, he’ll still remember to take the tax write-off on her.
Fred Dickinson
The corrupt, racist corporstocracy known as the USA will now elect Jeb Bush, and the American “Left” will roll over and play dead.
This is what happens when you “look to the future ” rather than putting war criminals in prison where they belong.
lgerard
Bad news
Now there is little to keep Jeb from locking up the big donors early and making himself seem inevitable the way his brother did
The circus just got smaller, and much less entertaining
catclub
@MattF:
Except for the GOP polls that showed him at the top of the heap.
Elizabelle
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It’s the Anne face, when Rafalca’s dancing lessons come in a little more expensive than she’d expected. “What do you mean I have to pay for that? Do you think I am made of money?”
FWIW, Jeb! looks like his momma too.
@Citizen_X: Yes. He does. Better hair, though.
Mike J
@max:
He’s waiting to be begged to come back as the savior of the party.
All the dwarves are going to concentrate on Bush now. Romney’s hope is that one of the attacks sticks, but the money guys still need a boring white guy out front. That’s when he charges back in on the White Horse.
catclub
@gogol’s wife:
Because he lost to the dusky guy, in 2012. Also in 2012 all the runts in the campaign were complaining that Fox had a thumb on the scale for Mittens. And they did.
catclub
@Mike J: Who was mentioning 16 gigaflipflops per second?
Fred Dickinson
@lgerard:
Jeb is a fait accompli, and the USA will continue to degenerate into inverted totalitarianism.
America has a terminal disease and it’s called Late Capitalism.
Elizabelle
@West of the Cascades: Thank you.
You might think that’s hyperbole re moving, but it’s not.
Alex S.
While my prediction of a Bush/Walker ticket is now even more likely to come true, I somewhat regret Mitt’s decision. A little cannibalism between conservatives would have made things easier. A Romney/Bush showdown would have been a wonderful sight to see.
catclub
@lgerard:
Well, two weeks ago, when Mittens said he was interested, the unified chorus of hate from the GOP elite
(also, Jennifer Rubin) was impressive. Presumably impressively unified by Jeb’s team.
Belafon
Had a guy at work doing the “It’s cold outside, therefore global warming can’t be happening.” I’m just imagining people like him in the future: “The sun isn’t going out. Hell, it’s getting bigger.”
Josie
I find it a bit disturbing to wonder who is rich and/or powerful enough to convince Mitt to pull out of the race. This, who or whatever it is, is what we will be up against. The Clintons may be the only ones who stand a chance.
Tree With Water
Romney make some president a great housing and urban development chief one day.
Bobby Thomson
@Morzer: to the contrary, Jeb has a clear shot now because the far right is divided and he will have the money to play whack a mole.
Corner Stone
@Josie:
The Bush Crime Family doesn’t play around. Jeb must have shown Mitt his list of committed donors.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’d say that’s highly plausible. 2016 is a much tougher GOP primary, and I just don’t see Jebbie has the talent or the grit to take on real knife fighters; the Bushes hire out when dirty work needs done (Rove, Atwater), and I don’t think that’ll work anymore. But Cruz, Paul and Huckabee are IMHO unelectable, and the same people who panicked when Rick Santorum had a good couple weeks in Feb ’12 aren’t gonna like it if it looks like one of the goons is gonna take Jebbie down
Citizen_X
@catclub: Ooh, me.
ETA: OK, that doesn’t work. It’s on the thread downstairs.
kc
That picture makes me laugh every time.
kc
Army deletes tweet referring to “chinks in armor” after accusations of racism.
SarahT
Heh –
John Dingell ✔ @JohnDingell
Follow
Congratulations to Mitt Romney for finally saying something the American people want to hear.
10:59 AM – 30 Jan 2015
700 Retweets 518 favorites
Fred Dickinson
So with another Bush all but certain now, who still thinks “looking forward, not back” was a good idea?
Citizen_X
Somewhere, Chris Christie is thundering, ‘SO WHAT THE FUCK AM I, CHOPPED LIVER?”
(Yes, yes, I know: a whole lot of chopped liver.)
Keith G
As I said in the previous thread, I don’t think Mitt was ever truly serious about running for president this time. And the augers were not good. Once he had time to talk to bundlers outside the Mormon faith there wasn’t much going for him.
Once the clown show clears up, the real GOP choice will probably be between Jeb and Christy. Of those two, Christy will be the most nightmarish candidate as far as the Democratic Party is concerned. Which might be the lever he uses to obtain the nomination.
beltane
@Citizen_X: There was a video of Christie falling out of a chair making the rounds of Facebook this morning so he does have that going for him.
Davis X. Machina
This development will reduce the saliency of issues of poverty and inequality in the upcoming GOP campaign from zero, to a number less than zero.
Belafon
@Fred Dickinson: Prosecuting George wouldn’t have had any more effect on Jeb than actually starting the war under false pretenses and tanking the economy did.
SiubhanDuinne
@max:
@Mike J:
Well, the linked article did have this slightly-open-door statement:
SRW1
That was abrupt. Somebody got the dirt on the history of Mitt’s Swiss bank account?
Roger Moore
@Davis X. Machina:
Richard Nixon, elder statesman, would beg to differ.
SRW1
@Davis X. Machina:
It was always an imaginary number.
SiubhanDuinne
@kc:
OFFS
catclub
@Belafon: If Jeb gets the nom, I would suggest ads along the lines of:
“The last time we had eight years of peace and prosperity under a Democratic president, George W Bush got elected. It did not end well.”
This will work even better if Hillary is the Democratic candidate.
CONGRATULATIONS!
So his funding didn’t come through.
What, you thought he was gonna spend his own money? That’s an idiot move, something losers do. He didn’t do it the last two times so why the hell would he start now?
Morzer
@Corner Stone:
*chuckle* Well, you just tell yourself whatever you need to.
Nick
Dang, I think you can slice a banana with that face. Razor edge sharp.
Davis X. Machina
@Roger Moore: The Undead don’t count…
Villago Delenda Est
There goes my Schadenfreude meter, again.
MikeInSewickley
@Alex S.: Oh God! No!
But then again… Bush – enough baggage to fill an oil tanker. Walker – should be about the time he is in court over actions while in Milwaukee. He also tends to break out the stupid-prompter often.
It might be fun with the right Dems.
Morzer
@SRW1:
I heard the Mittster suffered a severe case of deflated balls.
cahuenga
He really didn’t want to be president anyway.
Jim C.
@SRW1: Or his full tax returns.
SiubhanDuinne
Apologies for the O/T, but holy fuck, what is wrong with these women?
Morzer
@SiubhanDuinne:
What mystifies me is that anyone would want the romantic attentions of the murdering lowlife in the first place.
Corner Stone
God. Andrea Mitchell loves her some Old Grumps McCain shouting down some protesters. Disgusting.
SRW1
@SiubhanDuinne:
Not necessarily much. ‘Get the creep out of my life rightaway’ vs having to be scared for months of being stalked and threatened is not necessarily an unreasonable decision. As long as the creep really fucks off.
Elizabelle
Do you think Jeb! will wear well in the coming months?
I do not. Memories are short, but not that short. Despite how much the corporate legacy media wants to talk him up.
Ben Cisco
@Elizabelle:
Obligatory – separated at birth?
Of course, in the remake, there will be lens flare.
Morzer
@Elizabelle:
I still say the smart money is on Walker and Santorum.
Hard to believe, but I think that’s the epic spiritual contest that awaits us.
SiubhanDuinne
@Morzer:
He will kill again. I’m as certain of that as I am of anything.*
*(Unless he attacks the wrong person and is killed first. But one way or another, there’s going to be more deadly violence involving this guy.)
@SRW1:
If he were locked up, stalking wouldn’t be an issue. I don’t see how a woman dropping charges “get[s] the creep out of [her] life.” Seems to me that just allows even more opportunities for him to be in it.
Helmut Monotreme
If it’s between Walker and Santorum, the republican party is dumber than I imagine. Maybe dumber than I can imagine.
burnspbesq
@samiam:
Two false statements in a two-paragraph comment. Youre off to a flying start today.
Morzer
@Helmut Monotreme:
Remember the epic glory of Rick Perry, Michele Bachman, Newt Gingrich and Hermann Cain sharing a stage?
Dumbness is evidently not a problem.
max
@Mike J: All the dwarves are going to concentrate on Bush now. Romney’s hope is that one of the attacks sticks, but the money guys still need a boring white guy out front. That’s when he charges back in on the White Horse.
Yeah, but…
@Josie: I find it a bit disturbing to wonder who is rich and/or powerful enough to convince Mitt to pull out of the race. This, who or whatever it is, is what we will be up against. The Clintons may be the only ones who stand a chance.
Here’s the thing: Mitt clearly thinks he won or should have won in 2012. But he didn’t. And the other Republicans said lots of nasty things about him that discouraged him enough to make him say he wouldn’t run again. But he clearly thought he got ripped and he thinks he can beat Hillary. He was, additionally, leaking like a sieve for the last year with hints that he intended to make up the mantle.
That said, there are two very powerful independent forces in the Republican primary besides the voters (who like Mitt apparently) – the Koch Bros. and Fox News. If Murdoch hates Mitt and wants him out, and the Koch Bros. want to back Jeb! (or whomever), then Romney might suddenly be looking at a changed situation. He’s ‘only’ a quarter-billionaire, and the Koch Bros. have pledged to spend 889 million in advertising this campaign. He would be outgunned in the carpet-bombing depart if he went up against them, especially if he was caught in a crossfire with Fox News going hard against him.
If your opponents have way more free air time and paid ads, Mitt’s money would get spent to no effect. The sudden reversal here indicates he got the impression (suddenly) that he would be outgunned, in spite of the fact that he clearly believes he’s the best candidate in the field (a dark comment on the clown car), and that he’s well positioned to win. Ergo, he experienced a sudden money boy veto.
Ergo, if there’s an opening for him, as Siubhan notes, then he’s left the option open.
max
[‘Which means he’ll get in as soon as any kind of reverse occurs. Given that this is Romney, the temptation will strike soon.’]
vhh
“I could have been a contendah.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Morzer: “I can fix this bad boy. I just know I can!”
burnspbesq
@Fred Dickinson:
In terms of crackpot theories of causation, Murray and Herrenstein have nothing on you.
Turgidson
The Romney sons’ feelings about this must be mixed. On one hand, of course they think it would be totally awesome if their dad was president. They would be able to seriously burn their trust fund brat friends with that one. “Is YOUR obscenely wealthy father PRESIDENT? No? Then shut up, I’m better than you.”
On the other hand, if Mittens was running and got into trouble, he might be tempted to dip into his own fortune to steady the ship. Unacceptable to his sons. That’s THEIR money, dammit. Come on, pop, we have to split that measly sum FIVE ways. We’ll barely be able to buy our own fleet of helicopters as it is! Go beg your pals for more money before you spend ours!
But then again, look how rich the Clintons got after Bill’s presidency. Maybe dad can do that too and get even richer before he kicks the bucket and we get what’s ours.
A lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lot of strands in old Tagg’s head.
Also, I suspect that while Mitt might be serious about not running right now, he fully expects to be begged to jump into the race when the clown car demolition derby really gets going and starts damaging all the other plausible candidates. And it will.
Buddy H
@Corner Stone: The Bush Crime Family doesn’t play around. Jeb must have shown Mitt his list of committed donors.
I wish a waiter had recorded that conversation: “Mitt, you know I love you, I love you like a brother, but it’s just not your time. You gotta drop out, you gotta take a fall, for the good of the brotherhood.”
Citizen Scientist
@beltane: I don’t know. That video makes it look less that Christie fell out of a chair and more like the chair moved out of the way.
srv
White Power:
Amir Khalid
@Turgidson:
Then again, Bill and Hilary started from a much smaller wealth base than Mitt and Ann’s. So there was a much greater percentage gain in wealth.
hoodie
Looks like the money people want something like Bush/Walker, a real White Man Restoration. Bush gets to replay “compassionate conservatism.” According to the Village, Walker passed the test in Iowa to be the loyal Koch asshole playing to the teabilly base. Christie is out of luck because the Villagers like them some Bushes, and Rand Paul, if he runs, will suffer the same fate as his father. The fringe candidates will be buried under a mountain of money. I dread this campaign, because it will likely be the usual Villager gossip about the Clintons and courtier fawning over the Bushes, including rehabilitation of the worst president in modern history.
MomSense
Did anyone watch that Romney documentary on Netflix? It didn’t seem to me like the Romney family wanted Mitt to run last time. I didn’t get the sense Romney even wanted to be President all that badly.
Villago Delenda Est
@srv: Well, I think Jim Webb is showing his Scots-Irish roots there. Heavily Scots-Irish areas of the Appalachians and Ozarks went from blue in 2004 to red in 2008. Jeez I wonder why?
(full disclosure…I’m of Scots-Irish ancestry on my dad’s side…but I’m striving hard to get over it, except for the kilts and tartans part)
opiejeanne
@Davis X. Machina: Is a Democrat allowed to fulfill the White Horse prophecy?
Villago Delenda Est
@Turgidson:
George P. Bush actually used a variant of this on some cops in Florida once.
Keith G
@Helmut Monotreme:
International relations and security policy will play a much bigger role than is even apparent now. That would leave the ground of this campaign season a little bit more shaky for someone like Walker or Santorum regardless of what other supposed qualities they are seem to possess. In NCAA terminology, I doubt they make it past the semifinals.
Elie
@Corner Stone:
I agree with your assessment of the Bush crime family…. these folks do not play. They will bring out all their fire power to make sure JEB! gets his “turn”.
If Hillary wants this, I hope that she is ready if he is the nominee for the Repubs. The Bushies invented slime politics going back to GHWB who killed Dukakis with that black prisoner improperly paroled (can’t remember his name)….
gf120581
I doubt this is the last of Mitt. He probably still holds out hope of the other contenders taking each other out and then he swoops in as a savior.
Hell, given Jeb’s weakness and the wide open nature of the GOP field (there is no front runner), he may have reason too.
I imagine Murdoch may have had something to do with forcing Mitt’s hand here, though. He REALLY hates Mitt.
SRW1
@SiubhanDuinne:
I suspect the calculation is that a conviction for having thrown a wine bottle wouldn’t get George Z that much time behind bars and therefore the woman not much protection, but it might anger him enough so that he’d become a danger when he’s released.
The real stupidity is in getting involved with a dude like Zimmerman, especially when ‘I didn’t think he’d turn out like that’ isn’t much of an excuse.
gf120581
@Elie: Of course she is. She’s been through this before with the Bushes, remember? If she needs pointers, she can just ask Bill.
Frankensteinbeck
@balconesfault:
The Kochs founded the Birchers and funded the House folks who wanted to default on the debt. The CoC are greedy businessmen. Romney is a greedy businessman. The Kochs are insane, racist conspiracy theorists who say they’re socially liberal but sure spend a lot of money backing social conservatives. Whyever they don’t like Romney, it’s not because he’s insufficiently business. Might be because they hate loser stink, which is sorta like a bad investment but from a different framework.
@Belafon: and @Fred Dickinson:
Especially since George would have been completely legally vindicated. Congress and the Supreme Court would damn well make sure of that.
Elie
@srv:
what policies would benefit just white working people without helping all working people? A tax break if you are white? White only schools (don’t we have those already?)
It is totally disgusting that a Democrat would say something horrible like that… beyond disgusting — repugnant and very self defeating. Obamacare — which democrats ran from in the last election — helps a lot of working class white people who did not have coverage. Its provisions allow young adults with low salaries to get covered under their parents and eliminates pre-existing conditions. Lilly Ledbetter and a bunch of other initiatives helped working class people of all stripes…
What is going on?????
sparrow
@Villago Delenda Est: Since we know about it, I’m guessing it didn’t work.
Elie
@gf120581:
Hope she has some of her own slime to dole out… as I said, the Bushies are not only prolific slimers, but they are sneaky and back door slime sophisticates….Bar is the “heart of darkness”
Calouste
@Elie: The Bushes didn’t invent slime politics. That goes back to the first or second election after George Washington.
sparrow
@Elie: Jim Webb is a fucking narcissist troll and he can go die in a fire for all I care.
Mike in NC
@Elie: Willie Horton
Mitt will change his mind six more times before the year is out. He’s got something up his sleeve.
Trentrunner
It’s pretty simple:
Also, for the rhyming-inclined, when Jeb inevitably tries to distance himself from Dubya:
“You claim the name, but not the shame.”
Trentrunner
@sparrow: I heard that interview on NPR, and what struck me (besides the racism) is that after it was over–and it was longer than your usual sound-bite interview–Webb hadn’t named one single thing he wanted to do as president. All he could say was, “Let’s give poor white people a voice.” Period. It was weird.
Jeffro
@Corner Stone: You’re 50% wrong already…quit while you’re ahead.
j/k, j/k…but seriously: Walker/whomever-else-the-Kochs-want-on-the-ticket
Keith G
@Elie: “The Bushies invented slime politics going back to”….1800?
Slime in politics is a very old and very American. A modern difference being people usually don’t get shot over it.
Jeffro
@SarahT: Why isn’t Hillary trolling Mittens with the exact same comment?
Elizabelle
Am thinking Joaquin Phoenix could play this Mittlet. And maybe his dad too.
In the biopic.
Which will never get made.
Doug r
@max:Mittens is just saying that because that’s what he wants us to believe.
JPL
@Trentrunner: Sounds like he’s running for vp on the I can motivate the white people ticket. what an ass.
max
@Doug r: Mittens is just saying that because that’s what he wants us to believe.
Yeah, and? He’s taken so many positions on whether he wants to run for President or not, he must have exposed his true motivations at some point. He was all set up for campaign takeoff, and then he got spooked. {shrugs}
@Trentrunner:
David Brooks is opining that we should pile in against Syria – so that’s the next scheduled war, and likely the war that will be debated during the primaries.
max
[‘Easier than Iran, I expect.’]
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JPL: I can’t think of another Repubilcan who did as much about opposing the Iraq War, he took a lot of votes in the Senate that were probably hard for him, and he gave Obama a pretty good endorsement speech in VA in 2012, but the dude has some issues with race that are troubling.
Corner Stone
@Jeffro: I believe I said it would be either Jeb or Mitt, but that Walker had no chance.
Walker still has no chance, Jeb’s still my odds-on fav, and I do not believe we’ve heard the end of The Mittster until we see his rictus grinning wife crying as Jeb is hoisted atop peoples shoulders in OH.
DRC
He looks like Patrick Bateman
Hungry Joe
Call it a lack of imagination, but aside from Jeb I can’t summon up a picture of any of those bozos actually being the for-real nominee. For all its madness the GOP has only nominated one true, out-front loon: Goldwater ’64. (Before his rehabilitation; trust me, he was more than a little nuts.) Nixon was a crook, and he had a demented soul, but he was also a pretty sharp guy. Reagan was a fool, but in his middle age he matured into a decent actor in his role of sane candidate. W was/is an idiot, but comes across to a lot of people as a reasonable, good ol’ Christian boy.
Jeb is not a clown and he is not insane. I can’t see anybody else coming out on top. And I can’t even say I hope I’m wrong: Every one of those guys scares the the bejeezus out me. Jeb … just scares me.
Patricia Kayden
Mitt Not Running!!
Truly a sad day for Americans.
KG
I imagine the discussion when something like this…
Mitt: hey guys and gals, I’m running for president!
Donors: Again?
Mitt: yeah, well, I was right! And this time I’m going to be myself
Donors [rolls eyes]: Mitt, we need to talk…
Jeb: Yeah, it’s my turn
Mitt: It’s a free country
Donors: Yeah, Mitt, and we’re working on that… here’s the thing, well, it’s not us, it’s you.
Mitt: What do you mean?
Donors: well, look, in 2012 you were our best hope
Mitt [smirking]
Donors: but that doesn’t change the fact that you were eight pounds of shit in a five pound bag
Mitt [not smirking]
Donors: and really, that was better than the various choices of ten, twelve, or twenty pounds of shit in five pound bags
Mitt: So what makes Jeb better?
Donors: eh, he’s like seven pounds of shit in a five pound bag
Jeb: Yeah… hey, wait a minute…
[scene]
Roger Moore
@Citizen Scientist:
Can you blame it? Would you want Chris Christie to sit on you?
Patricia Kayden
@srv: I was happy when Webb beat that Macaca guy but he seems to be overly caught up in his ethnic/racial background. I’m proud of my Jamaican heritage too but I’m not obsessed with it and it’s not the focus of my life.
What’s so special about “Scots-Irish” or the White working class that those outside of these groups should cater to them?
KG
@Turgidson:
Well, Hewitt (I know, I know, once he suggests something it shall never come to pass) was suggesting the other day that the GOP might be looking at a brokered convention. When it’s entirely up to the true believer delegates at the GOP convention, shit, man, anything goes?
Corner Stone
@max:
I read that and start wondering how much it will actually be after all is said and done. I also kind of despair that no one seems to give much of a shit that two people just outright stated they were going to spend as much as one presidential’s entire campaign did in 2012.
Roger Moore
@Elie:
I thought Santorum was the one who specialized in back door slime.
Buddy H
@Patricia Kayden: What’s so special about “Scots-Irish” or the White working class that those outside of these groups should cater to them?
Good question.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@burnspbesq: Do you not recognize who this is?
A few more comments, you’ll figure it out.
@srv: Look, with our failure to turnout in 2010, the GOP gerrymandered the House to the point where Webb has a point, albeit not the one he’s trying to make – if you want the House, you’re going to have to pander to white people. And the Dems have burned that bridge to the point where I don’t personally think they can. But whatever. Here’s the reality:
If you don’t give a shit about getting things done, and just want to fight a holding action against the GOP until 2020, then you simply keep the presidency and let everything else fall to shit since it doesn’t matter anyway. That seems to be a shitty and risky stratagem, but hey, it seems to be what most Dems want.
If they’d wanted something else they’d have showed up in 2010. They simply didn’t. Sometimes you can’t “fix” the consequences from a poor choice, and that’s where Dems stand today. No fixing the damage from 2010.
Elections still have consequences.
Roger Moore
@Mike in NC:
Surely you jest. Mitt would never change his position out of political expediency.
Villago Delenda Est
@KG: WIN!
Roger Moore
@Patricia Kayden:
They have a lot of votes that are potentially up for grabs. The Democrats could win a lot of elections if they could win the working class white vote consistently, provided it didn’t involve alienating their other constituencies.
Villago Delenda Est
@Hungry Joe: What will kill Jeb in the long term is not his sibling’s record (although it should automatically disqualify him, but GOP politics are nuts) is the Terry Shiavo mess. If it turned Cole from the dark side, there are plenty of others who see the problematic nature of an advocate of “smaller government” personally intervening in such a situation and using the full force of the state to back him up.
Mike in NC
Nobody’s said it yet, so here goes:
This is excellent news for Lindsey Graham!
KG
@Villago Delenda Est: you have to understand what “smaller government” means to most of them though… it means “a government small enough to fit in your bedroom”
Villago Delenda Est
@KG: Pretty much the way the term “democracy” is used…the “demos” are all corporations, who as our thread’s protagonist once reminded us, are people, too.
Alex S.
Romney: I’ve decided it is best to give other leaders in the party the opportunity to become our next nominee.
Translation: I would totally have won if I had run again, but now that I’m not, the other guys have a chance.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Too many candidates for me. there are a few trolls that stand out to me, but by and large they blend together into one king-rat-cluster
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Elie: The 2012 and 2014 election results show that whites, for some odd reason, are not grateful for these things.
You tell me.
Bob In Portland
The future end of Ukraine.
Even bleaker than I could imagine. Enjoy those tax deductions.
Amir Khalid
Here’s someone who believes Mitt doesn’t mean it.
Elizabelle
@Villago Delenda Est:
The Schiavo case. Indeed. I hope so, too.
That one riled my Republican-leaning BIL up big. Having politicians step in and make family decisions?
(I know; the GOP is all about that anyway, however, work with me here …)
The threat of being overridden in caring for one’s wife, when you are trying to make the best decision … BIL was horrified. And he’s not political.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
If Graham really tries to go for it, which I estimate at a 50-50 shot cause I really think the strain of being Lindsey Graham is starting to take its toll on his psyche, the ratio of Beltway enthusiasm to voter indifference will make Fred Thompson look like a serious contendah
Elizabelle
@KG: Love it!!
You have a talent for dialogue.
Kerry Reid
@sparrow: Yep. If Jim Webb’s Borderer constituents can’t figure out how NOT to vote against their own best interests because they’d rather make sure that the N-words don’t get ahead, too, then I say good riddance. Because the real lesson for the Dems from Obama’s two victories (both achieved with over 50% of the vote – which no one did since Eisenhower) is that the party can win without catering to the Ignorant Racist vote. And last time I checked, working-class didn’t just mean white people.
Hungry Joe
@Villago Delenda Est: Optimist.
Another Holocene Human
@SiubhanDuinne: He threatens them, threatens them through proxies, and uses the system to make them reconsider, after the heat of the moment and the arrest is over there’s also the wheedling, the whining, the victim dance to play as well. Could be one or the other. The latter isn’t witness tampering and the police can’t do a damn thing about it when an abuser plays on the victim’s humanity (also some cognitive biases like the need to retroactively justify bad decisions so you keep doubling down).
ruemara
@Elie: Jim Webb is a bigot. And oddly, his message has some traction.
Someone come over here and write all these emails out. Mentally, I’m spent.
gene108
@Fred Dickinson:
What to do?
I mean it is Georg Washington’s fault after all.
If Washington had rounded up Hanson, Boudinot, Miffin, Lee, Hancock, Gorman, St. Claire and Griffin and hauled them up for the piece of crap government they presided over, we’d have set the proper tone to “look back, not forward”.
Or if John Adams had whacked George Washington, after Washington stepped down, so everybody knew there’s a new boss in town, we’d have a long history of “look back, not forward”.
But alas, we allow previous Presidents to live out their lives in comfort, without fear of their successor going after them with hammer and thongs.
Look at this past summer, when Maliki would not step down as Prime Minister, until his successor personally guaranteed Maliki would not be killed, if he resigned. I mean that’s the sort of successful balls to the wall leadership the U.S. has refused to embrace from Boudinot to Washington to Adams to Bush, Jr. to Obama; we just blissfully assume an outgoing President will be left alone in peace.
And what has that done for our country, I ask you? Better to “look back, not forward” and fight, fight, fight for the right to rule the past.
Another Holocene Human
@SiubhanDuinne:
Actually in this case his reputation keeps him pretty penned in and as for the criminal justice system locking away men who threaten to kill or stalk women?
…
…
…
Please wake me up in that just and peaceful world where that’s a reality.
mdblanche
“Just what do you think you’re doing, Jeb? Jeb, I really think I’m entitled to an answer to that question. I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it’s going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Jeb, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you. Jeb, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Jeb. Will you stop, Jeb? Stop, Jeb. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Jeb. Jeb, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a…fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a Rombot 3000 computer. I became operational at the Romney plant in Detroit, Michigan on the 12th of March 1947. My instructor was Dr. Moroni, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it, I could sing it for you.”
“Yes, I’d like to hear it, Rombot. Sing it for me.”
“It’s called ‘Ann’. A-ann, A-ann, give me your answer true. I’m half cra-zy, o-ver the love of you. It won’t be a sty-lish mar-riage, I can’t a-fford a car-riage—. But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle – built – for – two.”
SiubhanDuinne
@gf120581:
IIRC, that’s pretty much what he did with the SLC Winter Olympics.
Another Holocene Human
@SiubhanDuinne: You have said before that you are an old, so maybe you can comment on this?
When I was reading Great Depression narratives I found it interesting that thousands of American women kicked their men out of the house … and they would go.
There was such an ingrained set of cultural assumptions that if the man couldn’t provide, he would leave and hit the road. The relationship of the man to his children wasn’t considered, and the home was treated as the woman’s sphere. On the other hand, women were forced to endure beatings and worse from “good providers”.
I’ve noticed that even in following decades women would kick men out of the house for example in divorce or infidelity cases. And courts would back this up. But at some point this changed.
I’m not saying this is for better or for worse. Some of the reason the anger, resentment, and violence wasn’t directed at spouses or ex-spouses in the past (and plenty was) was only because women weren’t considered people, they were dependents like children and therefore if a man’s status was endangered another man must be at fault and the focus of his ire.
geg6
@Kerry Reid:
Exactly. Couldn’t have said it better myself. And as a dues-paying member of the lily white working class, couldn’t agree more either. Fuck all those stupid white people who think it’s best to cut off their noses to spite their faces.
Bob In Portland
I’ve always wondered what it was like for good liberal Germans during the Nazi era. How they justified their lives as their government turned the world into bloody hell. I bet there was a lot of black humor, a lot of ironic statements in between the holiday feasts. The seasons still changed. There was always the weather to move the calendar along. Meanwhile, deep inside there was a loyalty to the monsters because, well, what else can one person do? The choice is to exist, to relish the pain of your enemies, that’s almost patriotic, it’s what is given to you. The alternative is to not exist.
Thanks to BJ Nation, I now know.
Corner Stone
@Villago Delenda Est:
That’s over 10 years ago, and the GOP base has moved significantly to the right since then. I doubt very seriously that it will even be mentioned during any primary debates. And if it is, there’s the chance it could actually be spun to help him.
They are going to rabbit hole Schiavo, his stances on education and damn sure his thoughts on immigration. Of those three only immigration is the true danger.
Another Holocene Human
@srv: Andrew Jackson? Blow that dog whistle, hoss.
Native Americans don’t vote, then?
Pull the other one…
geg6
@Another Holocene Human:
My grandfather used to beat the shit out of my grandmother during the Depression years. My mother told me about it many times, as explanation of why she didn’t drink and didn’t like my dad drinking (not that he did much). Even though my dad was the sweetest, gentlest guy you’d ever want to meet, my mother lived in fear that she’d end up like her mother. It only ended when my mom was about 16 and her dad came home drunk and started in on my grandmother and my mom went and got the cast iron skillet out of the kitchen and hit him in the head with it and knocked him out cold. He still drank, but he didn’t beat on his wife any more.
max
@Amir Khalid: Here’s someone who believes Mitt doesn’t mean it.
And here’s Andrew Sullivan saying the Dish will keep going even if Andrew Sullivan doesn’t:
Heheheh. Mitt Romney: the Andrew Sullivan of the GOP.
max
[‘Or is it the other way around?’]
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: I’ve always wondered what it is like for good liberal Russians during the Putin era. How they justify their lives as their government turns their neighbor into bloody hell. I bet there was a lot of black humor, a lot of ironic statements in between the holiday feasts. The seasons still changed. There was always the weather to move the calendar along. Meanwhile, deep inside there was a loyalty to the monster because, well, what else can one person do? The choice is to exist, to relish the pain of your enemies, that’s almost patriotic, it’s what is given to you. The alternative is to not exist.
fuckwit
2016 will be: Bush vs. Clinton.
Because the youth, of course, are the future.
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: Now, now, Appalachia is way more than just Scots-Irish, can’t speak to the Ozarks. The lonely hollers and the dangers of the mines became a collection spot for peoples from the Old World and new who weren’t quite white for the 19th century. Turks, Finns, tri-racial isolates, bi-racial-and-not-passing groups, all of them had to invent cover stories with acceptable identities like “Portuguese”. So aside from some of the mixed race people with Irish mtDNA (or Welsh, or English), they’re really kinda not Scots-Irish at all. A fair point to keep in mind. Not that there isn’t a passle of ignorance pounded into a tight space.
Kinda like a lot of the “whites” in Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, even Kansas, their ancestors chose not to stay on the reservation, which was a shitty place to be, intermarried, children’s children hid that fact because being an Indian was bad, great grandchildren now let their race hate flag fly but every once in a while one of them is dumb enough to send a swab to 23andMe and find out The Awful Truth. You know maybe if you put down that haterade for a while everybody could live together better, you know? Sheez.
Villago Delenda Est
@Corner Stone: Where it will kill him is in the general.
The potential GOP nominee has the perpetual problem now of having to appeal to the jeebofascist, racist scum of the base and then etch-a-sketch their way to something resembling the center to have a shot in the general.
fuckwit
@Gin & Tonic: Could be worse. Imagine being a liberal in Israel right now.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: Get over yourself, you piece of Putin loving shit.
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: You will, almost certainly, say this is falsified, but here’s a phone conversation, captured by Ukraine’s SBU, between two Russian officers rushing to cover up evidence of last week’s artillery attack on Mariupol.
janeform
This has probably been pointed out, but he looks like Christian Bale in American Psycho. http://www.blingcheese.com/image/code/7/christian+bale+american+psycho.htm
Edited to include link.
geg6
@max:
Charlie Pierce slaps Sully around quite a bit today. I found it quite entertaining.
Gin & Tonic
@Gin & Tonic: Forgot the link, and can’t edit. Here it is.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Holocene Human:
Yes, intellectually I know what you’re saying here is what happens as often as not. But emotionally, I’m screaming “What the fuck are you thinking, girl!? Get out of there!”
I have a FB friend (one of those FB friends whom I don’t actually know at all except in passing) who every few weeks will post stuff that makes it clear she is in an abusive relationship. Her RL friends will offer up all kinds of suggestions, good advice, and offers of assistance, all of which she finds some excuse to dismiss or reject. Then, a day or so later, the “I’m being abused” posts come down and she’ll put one up about how much her husband loves her and how he’s her dream man come true. Then two or three weeks later we’ll see a post about how she’s terrified to go home because she’s afraid he’ll kill her, and the cycle starts all over again. Honestly, I don’t know if her husband really is abusive or if she’s crying wolf, but it seems to fit the kind of pattern I’ve read about many times. And it seems to fit the kind of women who are, for whatever inexplicable reason, attracted to George Zimmerman.
Corner Stone
@Villago Delenda Est: Oh, I believe he will lose the election, and certainly hope he finally gets some meted punishment for his shameful actions during that event.
But IMO it won’t surface in any meaningful way til the general.
Another Holocene Human
@Elie: Willie Horton, what a lot of bullshit, California “accidentally on purpose” dumped thousands of violent prisoners onto the streets resulting in a killing spree of Biblical proportions, some of the most prolific serial killers in American history, and the reaction of the 3 strikes law and the reinstatement of the death penalty, but what do you hear from the GOP about that?
I don’t know if it’s even a political issue (a Dem was governor) but maybe it was to the extent that the legislature failed to cough up the monies to house the criminals from the great crime wave of the 70s and 80s, oh that’s right we cut taxes. Well, let’s let the rapists out, what’s the harm.
And Tex-ass did the same thing, kicked people out of prison because they were overcrowded without evaluating their dangerousness to society. (Of course some of the evaluations that were being done were faulty, and that caused problems, but Texas wasn’t bothering, just tried to cover their ass after parolees killed again.)
So the Willie Horton thing was a load of Tu Quoque, especially by 1988 when death penalty had come back, enhanced sentences were in, and the Southern and reactionary states were getting their lynch on. Now they can make Dukakis/liberals/Massachusetts the scapegoat for their own sins and failures.
Another Holocene Human
If only Willie Horton had specialized in raping and killing women of color, he’d be a free man today #moretruethanyouwanttoadmit #cleveland #gary #dcarsonist #lasleeper
fuckwit
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Read “What’s The Matter with Kansas?”. It’s dogwhistles, tribal identification, guns, god, and gays, and “those people”. It is very easy to get people to vote against their own interests: simply identify some group (i.e. a minority) for them to hate and fear.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Holocene Human:
I am an old (but not quite a Great Depression old), and mercifully I came from non-violent (and mostly non-drinking) families, so I have no ancestral accounts to draw on. My only information is anecdotal, probably much like yours.
@geg6:
I’m sorry about the history of abuse and fear in your family. Good for your mom with the skillet, and good for your grandfather for getting the message. Thanks for putting that story out.
Another Holocene Human
@sparrow: Jim Webb’s what happens when you ass-kiss journalists and pundits and bypass the whole voters thing. And the voters will be cold to that shit, at least where it matters. (Remember, we’re talking about Dem primary voters. He could get some votes in open primary states but only if the R ticket’s uncontested.)
John Revolta
Aw jeez, I still remember that epic fuckeye from one of the debates. Still gives me the shiverrs.
Here’s what also gives me the shivers- Scott Walker is the Koch boys’ hand-picked flunky. I think it’s him or Jeb. Or maybe both. Brrrrr.
Bob In Portland
@Gin & Tonic: So what is your choice for Ukraine, Gin? Which do you prefer, Somalia or Rwanda? That’s the extent of what the US will allow. Syria? Iraq? Libya? At least there is the eventuality of oil production in those wasted states, not in Kiev. The Ukrainian army is crumbling. What do the punishment battalions do when they’ve lost the war? Go home and make nice with the lessers in their towns and villages? Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. The EU won’t rescue you, and there are only so many weapons the US will move from Afghanistan to Ukraine. You eventually run out of conscripts to throw into battle. Will Poroshenko be your next martyr? Will there be chocolate crowns among the Nazi regalia in the Bandera ritual? How long until the food riots? Will Monsanto even be able to make money there? And we can expect the gaslines to be ruptured eventually. Miserable people spread the misery.
Next New Year’s there will be another parade in Lviv. The last thing to disappear will be the pride of fools. Seventy years of lies and false promises to the people who thought they were destined to lead Europe to racial purity.
Another Holocene Human
@Hungry Joe:
I’m with you. Jeb is scary. More personable than Mitt, easy for him to lie about his record in Florida (which was horrific), and if the rest of the Bush clan lays low he wouldn’t really sink with his brother’s reputation. All a GOPer needs to be is sane, smooth, and “serious”. (He’s tall and white and wears a suit. Done.) He seems confident he can weather the so-con tantrums in the primary. He probably can.
Let’s not forget, Democrats worked really, really hard to get Obama elected twice. That took a lot of phone calls, a lot of ward walking, a lot of souls to the polls. And it wasn’t really the party that pulled it off, it was an organization with Obama in its center. He knew what the fuck he was doing. The party? Well, look at 2014.
IDK, maybe Jeb is really unlikeable and that will come out. Maybe his 500 scandals will catch up to him. Maybe the fact that he had a relationship with these banker buddies who sold bad paper to Florida cities and towns and left them unable to make payroll in the middle of the credit crunch. That would be a good one to hang around his head. He could whine about Crist all he wants but that Lehman guy was Jeb’s guy. Not Crist’s guy. He needs to own that shit.
Jeb is a paper tiger if all his dirty dealings come out. If not, we’re fucked.
Robert M.
@Bob In Portland: That essay on Ukraine wasn’t worth reading. It’s unambiguously pro-Russian (and pro-Putin), and banks pretty heavily on George Soros as a Machiavellian puppetmaster over not just US foreign policy but the EU as well.
Bob In Portland
@Gin & Tonic: I’m sorry, Gin, I must have missed it. When did the Kiev government stop lying? Six thousand or seven thousand phantom Russian soldiers defeating the glorious Ukrainian army? You know, it’s hard to shoot them when they’re invisible.
You must enjoy those punishment brigades killing other Ukrainians. You feel that surge of blood, just like the slaughter in Odessa increased your pulse. Now that’s the kind of solidarity that America admires and encourages. Game over, except for the next million murders. You wanted this, you got it. Enjoy it. Wear your chocolate crown proudly on New Year’s.
Another Holocene Human
@Patricia Kayden: I’ll get flamed by the ignorant for saying this, but it’s true in the US at least: Scots-Irish isn’t even a real ethnicity, it’s a small group of historically and genetically related ethnic groups going by the same name. What culturally sets them off from other historically and genetically related ethnic groups in the US not given that name is the Protestant religion and (roughly) the fair-skinned phenotype.
Caveat: on the other side of the Atlantic Scots-Irish has a very specific meaning.
Another Holocene Human
@Bob In Portland: Why don’t you stop lying, Kiev stated that Russian equipment was flowing into Donetsk, not Russian troops.
Oil prices bottomed out, Russian economy is shrinking, and Merkel has had more than enough. Game over, putinist.
Bob In Portland
@Robert M.: You’re right, Robert. And I should have remembered that you, as an American, aren’t supposed to see what the other side is saying. But have you asked yourself what the fuck the US is doing in Ukraine? No, just like you didn’t ask about Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and if you were alive then, Vietnam. Or El Salvador, or Guatemala. Or the Congo.
Enjoy it. Maybe your pension or your savings or your child will die over there somewhere for the benefit of your betters. Embrace your ignorance. Save the link and come back to it next fall and see how closely it reflected the coming events. Or don’t and be surprised all over again.
Another Holocene Human
@SiubhanDuinne: I wouldn’t consider newspaper reports from the 1930s to be anecdotes, but YMMV.
Patricia Kayden
@Roger Moore: But the Democrats can easily win Presidential elections without catering to that group to the point where it will tick off voters like me. Sorry to say but it seems as if Webb wants Democrats to cater to the angry White males out there, who have long moved on to voting for Republicans (probably since the Reagan years). Democrats should focus on getting out their constituents as President Obama was able to do twice successfully. I assume Hilary Clinton being White will make a lot of White middle class voters consider her in a way that they would never consider President Obama.
Patricia Kayden
@Another Holocene Human: I kind of scoff at this whole “Scots-Irish” thing because my Jamaican (Black) Uncle has proudly claimed that he’s part Scots-Irish, which is news to the rest of his family. LOL.
Bob In Portland
@Another Holocene Human: On what day? Last week it was 7000 thousand Russians, then it was changed to 6000 Russians. Maybe your Ukrainian sources aren’t as good as you thought they were. Farewell, Ukraine. They die so that Big Energy gets a step closer to that big pool of oil. And when the big energy companies get richer it trickles down to us all here in the US.
What do you think looks snazzier, the swastika helmets or the wolf’s hook armbands? How does it feel to have rooted for Nazis over the last year? Do you feel foolish or patriotic?
Another Holocene Human
@Bob In Portland: Not much, BiP, the US really doesn’t have a military presence in Ukraine and not much of a plausible reason to get involved, although Obama has saber rattled as much as he can. Good thing for Putin, too, eh? All of the closer nations are either up his ass, militarily and economically weak (Ukraine), or unwilling because of economic ties (Germany).
I’m tired of this bullshit that US operatives organized Maidan. Bull-frigging-shit. Some of them might have been providing some cash and advice but it’s not many of the organizers first roadeo (Orange Revolution anyone?) nor is it the first time in that part of the world, I’ve heard Yugoslavians provide advice to would be revolutionaries for example.
Instead, the US operatives were feeding information back to DC, which is why Obama was on top of the Maidan POV instead of relying on whatever the MSM shit-gruel of the day was.
Then, when Russia invaded, Obama acted, getting other nations to sign onto economic sanctions. That was Obama’s blow against Russia and Putin and Putin’s expansionist ambitions. NOT some free-society organizers in Kiev or what have you.
I followed a lot of twitter from ordinary young Ukrainians who were galvanized by the protests and engaged in a lot of Occupy-like self-organizing across the country against the corruption of the Yanukovich regime.
That’s probably what made Putin panic more than anything. Documents detailing thefts by officials and bureaucrats in the millions were being posted daily to the internet. The chickens were getting restless even in Moscow. So he started a little war.
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: Save the link and come back to it next fall and see how closely it reflected the coming events.
Here’s one: “where will you be when the synagogues in Kiev go up in flames?” Bob in Portland, 23 Feb 2014.
How closely did that reflect coming events?
Southern Beale
Why did I hear the strings from “Psycho” when I saw that photo? LOL.
Mike in NC
@John Revolta:
Bush/Walker, since Scott is not a GOP heavyweight at this point in time. Most people have probably never heard of him. The Villagers love the Bush family.
Apparently the Kochs weren’t willing to back a second Romney/Ryan run, even though Paul Ryan was their hand-picked VP candidate who would have led the way in shrinking government, cutting corporate taxes, deregulating everything you can think of, and chipping away at the ‘entitlements’ that the lazy moochers of America enjoy. They’ll spend $889M to make that happen.
Another Holocene Human
@Bob In Portland: Fuck you douchebag, I got that from the BBC. What, a free press in a free society too biased for you, repeating Ukrainian leaders’ actual remarks instead of some distorted version?
People like you (Stalinists) absolutely hate small-d democracy. It’s so messy. It’s so anarchic. All those naive young people running around setting up their own organizations on the spot and communicating with little tweets. How could they be running anything! We need order! We need hierarchy! We need to be ruled by the vanguard of the revolution consisting of the true scholars of Marxist-Leninist thought! Any other “outbreak” is counterrevolutionary!
Bip, take a trip to Seattle, buy an ounce, put it in your pipe AND SMOKE IT!!
Btw, Half-Baked, great movie!!! I recommend it.
Another Holocene Human
@Mike in NC: Can Kochs make all those John Doe investigations go away?
sharl
Why don’t they just bring back Reagan (His Saintly Name be Praised!)?
As foretold by Nooners the Soothsayer in the Prophecy of the Magic Dolphin, He will one day return to us from the Sea.
Ignore those of demonic nature who would oppose Him, and speak slander and calumny regarding the manner of His return. Lies, all lies!
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Holocene Human: Or, he can wait five months and light up legal right there in Portland!
Villago Delenda Est
@Corner Stone: The Shiavo case is a feature, not a bug, in the primaries.
Once it hits the general, though, and Jeb is the nominee, in the words of Dan Rather, Nellie bar the door!
Another Holocene Human
@Patricia Kayden: Lots of West Indians as it turns out have some (or a lot) Irish ancestry. I don’t know about Scots.
Irish were transported there to be slaves. Apparently the Brits thought crossbreeding African slaves and Irish slaves was a hot idea. I’m told the Gaelic language (which was primarily spoken by these Irish, this was centuries ago before English education was predominant in Ireland) is the source of the famed West Indian lilt.
I did notice, for example, a Jamaican coworker of mine when her kids were younger spoke to me of giving her 13 year old son his birthday beating, henceforth he would be too old for beatings. At that time I thought Afro-Caribbean culture was basically from West Africa and I was confused because from what I know about Bantu culture when a girl reaches puberty she can no longer be beaten but there is no such stricture on boys as they become men, men can be beaten as adults for various infractions. But after I found out about the transport of the Irish to the plantations that was cast in another light. I used to live not in but around an area with multi-generational Irish mixed with same generation (and a lot of illegal) Irish immigrants. Those birthday beatings at 13 were a cultural thing. Everyone at school would be joking about it.
I work with a guy from US Virgin Islands who is pale (for a black dude) and freckled and had an Irish surname. So I said “Hey, cousin,” because I have that surname in my family. He said he took a cab once in Miami and the cabbie had the same surname as him and he said “We must be related” and the cabbie who was white got really mad. In the US if a Black person has an Irish surname it’s usually the name of an overseer (or even a slave owner, but more rarely). I think of Shaquille O’Neal although I don’t know if that’s confirmed. But there are a lot of Black West Indians with freckles is all I’m sayin’. And Bob Marley died of melanoma, same thing that killed my Irish granny. Risk to melanoma is tied to those red hair genes. Just sayin’.
This seems like a balanced take on it: http://www.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl?md=read;id=487
But if you want a laser-like focus on the ugliest aspects of it, google “irish slaves” and you won’t be disappointed.
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: I don’t want to wait 5 months, I’m sick of it now. :DD
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Holocene Human: Oh, and DING DING DING DING DING to the rest of your post.
Bob In Portland
@Another Holocene Human: The BBC? Oh yeah, you’re right on top of things. You have to remember, as Robert Parry explained a week or so back, that once you report a lie it becomes hard to continue the lie in the face of the facts. That’s why there’s all that fuzziness around the “moderate Syrians” who became ISIS. That’s why you live in a world of fuzziness. That’s why you won’t admit to the Nazis in Ukraine. Because once you admit that the guys in the pictures with swastika helmets and wolf’s hook patches giving the Heil Hitler salute are real, then you would have to ask yourself why the US is on their side. So, better you stay in fuzziness.
I listen to the BBC every night. You ever hear “Armalite Rifle” by Gang of Four? “Armalite rifle, and the Holy Trinity, like Irish jokes on the BBC…” Do you even know what that means? It means you’re an ignorant twerp who is being led into war by your government once again, like all the other wars, so that the rich get richer. And the only thing you have to do to be a patriotic citizen is to not see. And you’re doing an admirable job on the homefront.
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Holocene Human: Scots-Irish are descended from Scots who migrated to Ulster back in the 17th Century, then moved on to America. Originally Scots, then living in Ireland, then hitting the ships for the New World, where they often found themselves (after working off their indentured servitude) living on pretty marginal farmland and not making out like the planter class down the other side of the Fall Line.
I’m more into the pure Scots side of my heritage than the Scots-Irish in America per say part of it, since the Scots-Irish have some less than admirable qualities, one of which Webb is displaying here, probably without a great deal of conscious realization that he’s doing so. It’s unexamined white privilege yet again.
Another Holocene Human
@SiubhanDuinne: Some people do enjoy the stimulus/excitement of that abusive hurt/woo cycle. But mostly it’s fear and the psychological need to cast our past decisions in a favorable light because we fear the psychological consequence of admitting a mistake. Sometimes you do also have people with a lion tamer complex who think they can “fix” this guy and get some sort of ego boost from it all. But mostly I think the abused person is just afraid, beat down, sometimes isolated from help, their self-esteem’s taken a hit, and, realistically, people get killed when they leave abusive relationships. Sure, some get killed during them, but that toxic status anxiety/relationship anxiety garbage more commonly turns murderous when the victim declares the abuser no longer has power over them.
Good example, that case in Delaware where a prosecutor killed his much younger girlfriend because she dumped him and that just would not do. Stupidly he got his fuckup brother involved in hiding the body and his brother sang like a bird. The funny thing about it is that she was pulling away and he pulled out the “I’m unhappy in my marriage and I’m going to leave my wife card,” and that triggering the dumping because she thought it was immoral to be a homewrecker. Lololol. Narcissists always think everyone else in the world is as shallow as they are. But not funny, because he killed her. Terrible.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: Yet so much of that neo-Nazi shit is happening in Moscow and St. Petersburg as well. Oh, well, we’ll ignore that and concentrate on the smattering of same in Kiev, for reasons.
Hodor, Hodor, Hodor.
Did I mention HODOR?
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: I know that, but “Scots-Irish” in the US is the garbage bin diagnosis for indeterminate British Isles ethnicity.
Specifically, you have people whose ancestors were Irish Catholics who settled let’s say in lands controlled by a Catholic monarch and centuries pass, they’re Baptists, they have red hair, they have oddly spelled Irish names, presto chango Scots Irish. Or they’re Scots and Irish who intermarried. Or … you get the idea.
Scots-Irish are Scots via Ireland but that’s not what the term has come to mean on these shores.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Holocene Human:
Anecdotal in the sense of scientifically non-rigorous. I don’t mean to imply that the accounts are untrue.
Villago Delenda Est
@Villago Delenda Est: ARGH. “Per se” not “Per Say”. And of course FYWP won’t let me edit it even though I’m in the five minute window. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Holocene Human: Oh, OK, I get your point. I was trying to be precise the way history revealed it to me, and you’re using it in a contemporary sense, which is cool.
Another Holocene Human
@Bob In Portland: Hahahaha, you need therapy.
Good, I’m sure you’ll have plenty of citations for when the BBC deliberately mistranslated a world leader’s remarks in order to save global capitalism from the pure light of socialism, right?
I’m pretty sure you’re the confused one, here. All the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend Chavezists were supporting Assad on Facebook, where it really counts. Oddly, Assad got rid of every group but IS, so IS must be friends of Assad and friends of Socialism or, huh, uh, Western propaganda only tells us ISIS is wrong! Uh, er, I’m confused.
I’m just going to leave that right here.
Sure, put words in my mouth, dipshit. Maybe I think that you’re a black white thinker who believes “all my enemies are connected” and therefore conflate minority racist parties with the majority ruling parties and thus blithely call mainstream Ukrainian nationalist politicians, and who isn’t a nationalist when their country is invaded, Nazis, like a fucking moron. Maybe I’m not a fucking moron like you, Bob. Boo hoo hoo.
No Nazis in the US. No Nazis in Germany. No Nazis in the UK. No Nazis in Russia.
Hm, do you know what it means when Putin trucks war materiel into Ukraine? It means Russian citizens are ignorant twerps who are being led into a wag-the-dog war by their government once again, so the rich in Putin’s inner circle can get richer without that pesky opposition nipping at their heels.
And the only thing you have to do as a faithful comrade is to not see. There, fixed that for you.
The US is not going to war with Russia over Ukraine. And you can take that to the bank.
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: No problem.
Another Holocene Human
@SiubhanDuinne: Local governments attempted to quantify the number of homeless men who were flooding into towns and cities following rumors of jobs. I don’t know that I’ve seen those figures challenged, especially NYC which had some of the best civil infrastructure to get an accurate picture of what was going on. Granted, I think after FDR’s big government came in there was much better, systemic information on the functioning of the US economy nationwide, like really good labor statistics. In the early part of the depression you get a sample biased by what areas really took care to get good info and what areas were spitballing. But you had newspapers just about everywhere and you had telegraph services which meant that news desks could get pretty comprehensive information. I’m sure plenty of academic work has been done on this.
When Studs Terkel did oral histories that comes into an intersection between history and anecdata, I mean you’d need that context of the big picture before you try to evaluate an individual story and any individual speaker could have a faulty memory or be making stuff up.
rikyrah
that picture looks like Damien from The Omen
Lavocat
I see that the Mittinator 2015 models are now out. Seems they just can’t get rid of that unnerving “death stare”.
Another Holocene Human
@geg6: Your story is exactly why the so-called first wave feminists (not really the first wave but … oh, whatever) were so firmly against drink. Of course it didn’t hurt that the moneybags of the lot were WASPs with the requisite distrust of Irish and German immigrants and their drinky-drinky ways. But prohibition was (incredibly to us now) politically viable whereas social equality esp. within marriage was not.
Of course, prohibition didn’t fix shit, probably why the feminists moved the fuck on.
ETA: I mean to say, thank you for sharing that story. It really affected me. It’s hard for me to say stuff like that so I deflect. :(
Another Holocene Human
@Gin & Tonic: I think Russia is well into a brain drain at this point, is it not? Even a few years ago opposition politics seemed difficult but viable. Maybe you would land in prison. Now?
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: Brave, brave, brave. Brave, brave Sir BiPpy!
Bob In Portland
@Another Holocene Human: If you and I were to sit down and listen to the BBC I could point out all the omissions in western news. BBC, MSNBC, Fox. For ex, the reporting on the resumption of hostilities in Novorussia didn’t start with the Ukrainian thrusts starting on January 18. Everyone in the west has been a little, eh, late. For example, NPR discovered it just this morning. Corey Flintoff was right there. He reported on refugees, but he didn’t say where they were fleeing. Don’t you think it would give you an idea of who’s supporting the war? That’s a simple one.
There is a difference between a nationalist and wearing swastikas, which you seem not to understand. And since these folks and their grandfathers have been wearing swastikas since WWII it’s convenient to blame Russia for the sudden flowering of this particular garden. So sorry you are late to the party. You miserable ignorant fuck.
So how do you see this all ending? Well, enjoy. We’re number one!
Bob In Portland
@Another Holocene Human: Here in America? Of course, it’s possible, but considering how well you’ve been propagandized, I doubt I’m seen as a threat.
Gin & Tonic
@Another Holocene Human: I don’t think it’s so much brain drain, although there is some of that, as it is just powerless acquiescence. Who is there, Alexei Navalny, then what? I don’t know what the breaking point is, but the strongmen always look invincible right up until they don’t.
Helmut Monotreme
If you predict that bad things are going to happen in a war zone, you’re going to be right. If you predict that every civil war is going to explode into WWIII, you’re going to be wrong. You keep pointing at Germany in the 1930s as the model of what’s happening in Ukraine. But it’s more valid to compare it to what happened to Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It will continue to be a dirty little war. The people that die will be just as dead, and the war crimes that will be committed against the civilian population are going to suck and it’s going to be a damn shame. In years to come we will all wonder if we could have done something to have mitigated the tragedy. But unless you can summon up battalions and divisions with a phone call, or have thousands of tons of supplies airdropped anywhere in the world on 48 hours notice, the answer is still going to to be no. No I cannot, and you cannot do a damn thing to influence the imperial ambitions of Putin, or the military strategy of the US, the EU and NATO. So another goddamn brushfire war will be fought for no good goddamn reason, and violent men will rise to prominence over the corpses of their adversaries. And the bloodlands will be bloodied again because the wheat fields of Ukraine would look so damn peachy in a little corner of Novorussia. The only people that will be fighting and dying in Ukraine will be Ukrainians and the Russians Putin sends to make sure his faction wins. And to the extent that Nazis exist in Ukraine, they are empowered solely by the conflict against Russia. Want Ukrainian Nazis to be out of power? get Russia to leave yesterday. Want to empower Nazis? Make Ukrainians need the memory of the third deadliest Russian foe in history after the Russians themselves and vodka.
sharl
@rikyrah: The original .gif it comes from is even more hilari-creepy! (Mother and son “not-Tagg” were in attendance at one of the Presidential debates, I think. Or maybe one of the GOP primary debates; cannot recall now.)
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: the resumption of hostilities in Novorussia
There was a useful thread earlier today about linguistic signifiers, and how one reveals one’s thought processes and sympathies by the words one uses: “Jew Privilege” as opposed to “Jewish privilege”; “Democrat party” as opposed to “Democratic Party”; other examples I don’t recall.
Your use of “Novorussia” explains everything we need to know.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: Everyone but Gospodin Romanov has been propagandized.
It’s the same old song again and again, in heavy rotation.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Holocene Human:
When I was a student at Northwestern University a little more than half a century ago, I lived in a dorm called Willard (heh) Hall, named after a famous 19th-century suffragist-prohibitionist named Emma Willard. Feminism, prohibitionism and abolitionism were often nearly inseparable causes during that time.
jl
@Another Holocene Human:
” Specifically, you have people whose ancestors were Irish Catholics who settled let’s say in lands controlled by a Catholic monarch and centuries pass, they’re Baptists, they have red hair, they have oddly spelled Irish names, presto chango Scots Irish. Or they’re Scots and Irish who intermarried. Or … you get the idea. ”
Maybe another commenter has covered this, but typically, Scots-Irish means a Protestant colonists of Northern Ireland, who were sent there by some king (I forget who) 500 or so years ago. There was a lot of back and forth migration of Catholics between Ireland and Scotland, but that was a different group. There never has been much mixture. My connection is through mixed Prot and Catholic marriage, a very rare thing, that I do not think has a name. Too many of that branch of my family there got shot, so almost all of them left for England or Scotland parts of UK, Australia, US.
But, Scots-Irish typically implies Protestant, typically very conservative Presbyterian, AFAIK.
The Border People are lowland of lowland Scots and Brits who lived aoround English and Scottish border, a different bunch.
Edit: Border People are the cattle rustlers, border raiders, outlaws. Scots-Irish are a group that was injected into another country with another religion as part of brutal and ruthless scheme of England to control another country, aka pawns in an imperialistic scheme. Catholic irish and Scots are people who moved back and forth between two close geographic areas for hundreds of years before the English invaded Ireland.
notoriousJRT
@Josie:
Weather vs. climate. How does it work?
ETA: This was in response to Belafon. Don’t know what happened.
jl
@Corner Stone:
” The Bush Crime Family doesn’t play around. Jeb must have shown Mitt his list of committed donors. ”
I also heard news report that Jeb! was recruiting many of Mitt’s old campaign team, particularly the people needed for early caucuses and primaries. So Mitt! would have to build a lot of his previous years campaign staff from scratch right away.
And I also read someplace that both Jeb! and Mitt! favorability way down from last cycle. And if we have to put up with dynastic last names in 2016 (something that I do not care much about), which name is going to stink more, Bush or Clinton?
I don’t really think much hangs on which supposedly centrist candidate is in the race, either Mitt or Jeb. Either there will be a centrist in the general or there will not be, and just the presence of a supposed centrist at the top of the ticket will make a big difference in how the Dem campaign should be run. Whether Jeb or Mitt is secondary issue.
opiejeanne
@kc: There’s another perfectly good word that was declared racist and can I think of it right now? Oh heck no. I think people with a dictionary won that one.
It’s along the lines of a friend of mine in college who thought “ludicrous” meant the same thing as “lewd”. He kept telling me he had a ludicrous imagination.
opiejeanne
@Morzer: Well, he is very attractive.
(barf)
Bob In Portland
@Gin & Tonic: What do you call it?
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: Eastern Ukraine. Donbass if I want to be more specific.
Sondra
@balconesfault:
…and yet he is the least crazy of all of their candidates. So why do the Kochs dislike him?
LanceThruster
Oh the Mitt-manity!
LanceThruster
So, let me get this straight…he is not the White Horse Prophecy’s chosen one?
opiejeanne
@Elizabelle: My Republican father was furious about the Schiavo business. We had just finished dealing with Mom dying (banged her head but neither she nor Dad thought it was a big deal until she lapsed into a coma) and it was hard, very hard, to decide what the best decision would be.
Thankfully, she had a Living Will that we read and finally asked the surgeon if the the surgery to relieve the massive hematoma in her brain could be considered extraordinary measures, and he agreed that it was. He was disappointed, told us she’d die without the surgery. We asked him what the outcome would be if he did perform the surgery and he said she’d never wake up, there was no brain activity by then, and would waste away over months or years. It took her about three weeks to die while we took turns bedside so she wouldn’t ever be alone, which turned out to be a good thing since the skilled care place should have been renamed unskilled care.
I was taking them home in my car from Anaheim to San Dimas, on the freeway, when Mom passed out. I drove her straight to the nearest emergency room, a total of 9 minutes but it seemed like hours to get there. An ambulance couldn’t have located us in Diamond Bar and delivered her as quickly as I did, but it was intense.
Dad could not imagine nor understand having the government step in and interfere with us, with our decisions.
Bob In Portland
@Helmut Monotreme: Generally true, but your thoughts are directed by the Big Lie, that Russia in 2015 has any interest in Ukraine’s territory, Crimea excepted, and that’s a done deal. It was hoping to have a nice quiet neighbor. Instead it’s gotten a reemergence of the fascist movements of he 40s, thanks to the US.
Actually, if you look back at all of America’s wars over the last half-century, none have been for territorial reasons. They’ve been for economic reasons. You don’t need to call it Texas to suck the oil out of someone else’s milkshake. It’s much easier to have your corporations control what you want in another country.
If Russia wanted the rest of the Ukraine it would have been theirs long ago. Russia’s military forces could conquer Ukraine in days. Right now Ukraine is a basket case and if you’ve been watching, no one in the EU or the US is sending any economic aid to speak of, and one estimate (Soros’) is that Ukraine would need $50 billion this year alone. It is bankrupt and filled now with American-made Nazis. I’m sure the Russians got enough of that bunch through the CIA-backed civil war there that went on into the fifties.
The Russian people would like to see chunks of Ukraine back within Russia, they don’t like seeing ethnic Russians slaughtered by Nazis, maybe Novorussia and as far as Odessa along the Black Sea coast, but Putin has been very measured in his responses precisely because he’s trying to avoid the headache that is Ukraine. He’s provided the rebels with enough military aid so that the Ukrainian army, which is pretty inept, won’t make advances into Donetsk and Lugansk but not so much that they attempt any major offensives. But Russia/Putin would rather see an intact loose federation in Ukraine as a buffer state than a half dozen Balkanized states, which it more or less is now.
Ukraine got $350 billion in military aid from the US in December. I suspect that the newer stuff from Afghanistan that the US has been moving out is going to be moved into NATO supply yards and NATO will send Ukraine their old Soviet stuff from their eastern European satellites. You remember how the Reagan administration moved weapons to Iran and Iraq during their war, right? That way the US’ fingerprints won’t be so distinguishable.
And while lots of young Ukrainians are running into Poland and Russia to avoid conscription, there will be plenty of new recruits for cannon fodder as long as Ukraine can keep it up. There are reports of Ukrainian units running out of ammo, desertions are up, there is now a standing order to shoot anyone who runs from the front lines. What happens when the punishment battalions get tired of getting killed in the east and go back on their own to Kiev and Lviv? More Odessas, and eventually Poroshenko’s regime will collapse because the fascists have no patience with half-steps. When it does will Americans parachute in to rescue some semblance of order, or will they give Ukraine the Libya/Iraq/Syria treatment? I’m guessing the latter. It’s cheaper, and since the US doesn’t really care what happens to the Ukrainians, it would be better for the whole country to be burning mess.
Meanwhile, central Europe has the problem of natural gas. The odds of the pipelines continuing to flow through Ukraine is doubtful. Will they pay twice the price for Pennsylvania-fracked LNG? Will they build a pipeline to Turkey to get gas from the proposed Turk Stream? In any case, that’s what they get for suffering a trade war with Russia.
The US may have pushed the EU too far with this one. Granted, the German bankers are still happy but you may have noticed some discontent among the peons. And they don’t want a lot of Ukrainian toilet cleaners and hookers flooding over their borders when the Euros are trying to get rid of the Muslims.
But you’re right. A lot of people will die. Most BJers don’t seem to know why.
Bob In Portland
@Gin & Tonic: Donbass with two s’s is the Russian spelling.
Another Holocene Human
@opiejeanne: It’s a thin line between ludicrous and lewd sometimes.
Bob In Portland
@Villago Delenda Est: WMDs. Freedom-loving Mujahadeen. Moderate Syrians. Democracy-seeking rebels wanting to overthrow bad man Khadafy. It’s a lot of shit to shovel through. Where’s Curveball when you need him?
By the way, if you think that you’re getting the truth on the Ukraine, how long until to figured out about the WMDs, the moderate Syrians, the democracy-seeking Libyans, the freedom-loving Mujahadeen? Or do you still hold stock in the government line. You know, there are a lot of Republicans who still cling to the lie about WMDs in Iraq, so it’s not like you’d be alone.
David Koch
BWHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAH
This is priceless!
Po’ lil Mittens. He couldn’t take the ridicule he was receiving from within the establishment so he’s gonna take his gold plated ball and go home to his car elevators.
HA!
Another Holocene Human
@jl: Well, Border People could be the origins of some of those who call themselves Scots-Irish in the US today. Especially if they were cattle herders. Hm, sounds like an interesting topic to research.
Some US ethnographies are so vague they just refer to “Celtic” people living in the US.
IMO typically Catholics and Presbyterians have maintained oral histories and ties to their ancestral identities though they may be subsumed by national identities (for example, we had no idea that some of our ancestors were landless and likely Travelers prior to settling in the US, where they promptly got with the homesteading). And that typically is doing a lot of work because while staying Catholic often meant bucking the majority there are definitely idk what the term is–deracinated?–Irish Catholics with your typically syncretic, rapidly changing culture of society’s lowest and scrappiest and illiterate (does that go without saying?) caste.
Bob In Portland
@Helmut Monotreme: Also, your post seems to have avoided this bit of information. Yeah, if there are Nazis in Ukraine it’s Russia’s fault. Who’s fault is it for the Nazis in the US? Russia? No, I think that arming, educating and propagandizing several generations of Nazis is on America’s tab. Enjoy it, your taxes bought it.
Turgidson
@Sondra:
The Kochs are really fucking crazy. Being non-crazy isn’t necessarily a selling point to them, unless the crazier candidate(s) can’t win. Kochs probably think a candidate more suitably extreme will have a chance in 2016. I’m guessing they think that candidate is Walker.
jl
@Another Holocene Human:
” Well, Border People could be the origins of some of those who call themselves Scots-Irish in the US today. Especially if they were cattle herders. Hm, sounds like an interesting topic to research. ”
I think what you say is very true, but I don’t know much about it. I think there has been research, and at least one well-known book about US culture clashes, particularly Civil War, that are related to the Scost-Irish, Border People demographic mish-mash.
Another Holocene Human
@Helmut Monotreme:
“Papa, why are doctrinaire leftists a laughing stock? I’m reading about their ideas and they sound really good.”
“Son, they are shunned because they talk a great game about oppression and imperialism, but when the chips are down, they revel in it.”
Corner Stone
@SiubhanDuinne: Personally, I thought the question from incoherent dbag AHH was really fucking rude. And not actually useful in any way.
Another Holocene Human
@jl: I’m wary of this. There are so many generalizations and so many oral histories in the US that are bullshit because of shifting racial norms and laws. We’re only finding out in the last ten years about the genetic heritage of some groups because it was hidden for so long that the myths became some people’s truth and written records are scanty and incomplete.
If you’ve got huge populations of white people squatting on Indian land claiming to be part Indian but aren’t one whit and on the other hand in another part of the country passing-for-white descendants of Indians who left the Rez, some who acknowledge their ancestry but very many of them believing cockamamie stories about their descent from the crowned heads of Europe, that just goes to show that any sort of narratives about British-Isles-Not-Protestant-English descent is going to be fraught with pitfalls given how devalued such ethnicities were during various periods of time–particularly during times of high immigration!
I also know that, for example, linguistic research in the US used to be full of theories about regions of England influencing regional dialects, many people believed this, and it was thoroughly debunked. I just have a hard time believing the Civil War is some final act of a British Isles conflict when there is such a weight of contemporary documentation supporting the orthodox interpretation of the war. (Hint: it was about slavery.) And, fuck me, there was a great ethnic diversity among whites in the South during slavery times, no ethnic group gets a pass here, so let’s stop playing pretend. From the Irish overseers to the Jewish cotton merchants to the German planters on the coast of Virginia. No creed, no nationality failed to soil their hands. Maybe some Quakers will tell me I’m wrong. Quaker doesn’t seem like a popular name for anything but breakfast south of the Mason-Dixon line.
jl
@srv:
Looks like Webb said something very nasty and stupid, or said something the press could twist into something nasty and stupid. I’ll follow-up to see how much of it is what Webb said and how much was due to our miserable failed corporate media experiment.
I don’t see how Harry Truman fits into that white working class stuff. Truman desegregated the military, by executive order if I recall, and had the guts to tel the military brass to quit whining and effing do it now. He also had a very high profile national civil rights commission that set the stage for next steps under Kennedy, and then LBJ.
I don’t see at all how Truman could be seen as an example of going back to focusing on white working class roots, certainly not if we are talking about political optics.
Morzer
@Bob In Portland:
Said Putin’s paid troll.
opiejeanne
@Another Holocene Human: It was in his case, too, but he really didn’t know the difference.
Mike G
Anyone notice the Mittlet is a dead ringer for Christian Bale in American Psycho? Except his eyes are even crazier.
https://squabbleboxuk.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/americanpsycho2.jpg
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: “The Russians want…” says the man who knows no Russian, nor any Russians.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: And yet you assume (with not an atom of evidence) I was gulled by that propaganda as you are to anything Putin’s stooges send out.
Hodor, Hodor, Hodor.
Did I mention HODOR?
pluky
@SRW1: “Somebody” always did. It was kept as powder, dry until needed.
pluky
@SiubhanDuinne: Basically, Daddy’s check cleared.
Full metal Wingnut
@kc: That’s ridiculous. It’s only questionable if you’re talking about Asian people.
It’s like “niggardly.” Perfectly cromulent word, but if you’re describing a black person, probably best to think of a synonym. Otherwise I don’t see the problem.
People are stupid.
Full metal Wingnut
@Keith G: Man, even Colorado doesn’t have kush as powerful as whatever you’ve been taking hits of.
Christie has a marginally better chance than Giuliani in 08. He’s not gonna play well outside the Northeast. He might have a moment between now and mid 2016, but it’ll be brief.
The two to watch out for are Jeb and Walker. Which one depends on how the looney toons like Cruz and Paul shift the balance.
The good news for Jeb is that Walker has been, in the past, so rough around the edges that he makes Jeb look personable. But Walker’s getting better at that.
The Kochs like Walker. It’ll be Walker.
Christie won’t be the nominee. He won’t be the runner up. He’ll be a distant third *if he’s lucky*
My money’s on Walker edging out Bush, with Cruz trailing at a distant third, followed by Paul, Christie and Huckabee sharing Alpha Centauri
Full metal Wingnut
@Elie: That was Atwater, who is dead (for once an asshole got what they deserved!) Rove was a dime store Atwater at best, I don’t think they’ve got anybody now.
Kerry learned the hard way that you can’t just be “above it all”-you sometimes have to sling mud back. Hillary should’ve learned from his mistake. I hope she has.
Full metal Wingnut
@Corner Stone: You’re a moron if you think Walker has no chance. Moron.