(h/t J. Michael Neal)
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Looks like Willard’s terrible, horrible, very bad, no good week remains a hot topic, praise Murphy. Some more gems, for your pass-it-forward delection:
Matt Taibbi, in his Rolling Stone blog, on Romney’s “new low“:
Romney can’t even be mean with any honesty. Even when he’s pandering to viciousness, ignorance and racism, it comes across like a scaly calculation. A guy who feels like he has to take a dump on the N.A.A.C.P. in Houston in order to connect with frustrated white yahoos everywhere else is a guy who has absolutely no social instincts at all. Someone like Jesse Helms at least had a genuine emotional connection with his crazy-mean-stupid audiences. But Mitt Romney has to think his way to the lowest common denominator, which is somehow so much worse.
Most presidents have something under the hood – wit, warmth, approachability, something. Even the most liberal football fan could enjoy watching an NFL game with George Bush. And even a Klansman probably would have found some of LBJ’s jokes funny. The biggest office in the world requires someone who buzzes with enough personality to fill the job, and most of them have it.
But Romney doesn’t buzz with anything. His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations. He’s like a teenager who stays up all night thinking of a way to impress the prom queen, and what he comes up with is kicking a kid in a wheelchair. Instincts like those are probably what made him a great leveraged buyout specialist, but in a public figure? Man, is he a disaster. It’s really incredible theater, watching the Republicans talk themselves into this guy.
Alex Koppelman, at the New Yorker, complains that “Mitt Cries Condi“:
Political campaigns don’t, as a rule, tend to show much respect for the collective intellect of the media that cover them. They think we’re lazy and sloppy and more interested in noise than policy, and that we can, like babies and cats, be easily distracted by shiny objects. They’re not totally wrong.
Even by those standards, though, the stunt that Mitt Romney’s campaign pulled Thursday evening was almost insulting in its lack of subtlety. Scrambling to divert the media’s attention from the question of when, exactly, Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital really ended, as compared to when he says it did, they decided to leak the shiniest object of them all: a veepstakes rumor about a “surprising name” emerging as a frontrunner, floated directly to Matt Drudge…
Forget that Romney’s base doesn’t particularly like Rice, whether because of her pro-choice views or because she was too much of a realist for the neo-conservatives in the Bush foreign-policy establishment. There are dozens of possible running mates out there—for what possible reason would Romney pick the one person guaranteed to give President Obama the chance to take some focus off the economy and make the election into a referendum on George W. Bush’s foreign policy? (If you don’t think Obama’s reëlection campaign has done enough crowing about the fact that he did what Bush couldn’t and got Osama bin Laden killed, wait until the Biden-Rice debate.)
Saturday Morning (Cartoons) Open ThreadPost + Comments (149)