Also, I added “Saul Alinsky is my Copilot to the rotating taglines.” I think we need some new fresh taglines. Any suggestions?
Excellent Links
Tuesday Evening Open Thread
In honor of Romney’s docu-dump (550 pages, more than a ream of paper) of just two years’ worth of tax returns, I give you Doghouse Riley:
… There’s no sacred text of Alexander Hamilton which consecrates what was done at Bain. There’s no shrine to unfettered rapine honored in every American household. What Bain did–what Willard Mitt Romney and his two hard-scrabbled Hahvahd degrees did–was take every advantage of a gamed system, a gamed system we can call, not for want of a better term but because there is no better term, the Reagan Revolution.
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Faced with a troubled, stagnant economy which was in trouble, and had stagnated, largely because its multinational colossi did not want to be bothered adapting to a changing world–one in which energy wasn’t plentiful and cheap, one in which the United States did not stand as the only global player, one in which consumers had begun to take their rightful place in the endless merry-go-round of merchantilism–in other words, the world of the 21st century, the one we’re failing to adapt to today–unless their built-in advantages were preserved. So the Reagan administration, and the Western-Southern alliance in the Congress, defanged and dismantled the legislative safeguards which had for two generations somewhat leveled the playing field, and protected the vulnerable public from the worst of Boom and Bust. Which allowed the “visionaries” and “tenacious achievers” to bleed the system, to convert assets into cash. Meanwhile destroying the assets.
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Fooled plenty of people. Made Reagan look like an Economic Miracle Worker, provided you didn’t look too closely or ask why he simultaneously had the worst jobs creation record of any post-war President. Until his successor inherited the snake oil inventory.
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That’s what Romney did; his tireless efforts were designed to prove that any idiot with money can make more money, provided making more money is the only thing he cares about.
Apart from the State of the Union address — or, as the Media Village courtiers are pleased to call it, “President Obama’s inaugural campaign speech of 2012” — what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Bless their dedicated souls, the Guardian is liveblogging the State of the Union!
“What Mitt Romney Learned from His Father”
Reason to go on, if last night’s GOP debate seemed to suck away your very soul: Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland and Before the Storm, will be writing a weekly online column for Rolling Stone. And his inaugural work discusses some of the ugly political history we’ve forgotten since the days of George Romney:
… His calling card was his shocking authenticity; his courage in sticking to his positions without fear or favor was extraordinary. In January of 1964, for example, the second-year governor received a letter (downloadable here) from a member of the top Mormon governing body reminding him of the “teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith” that “the Lord had placed the curse upon the Negro.” Drop your support for the 1964 civil rights bill, the elder warned, arguing that God might literally strike Romney dead for his apostasy: “I just don’t think we can get around the Lord’s position in relation to the Negro without punishment for our acts,” the letter said. Romney only redoubled his commitment – leading a march the next year down the center of Detroit in solidarity with Martin Luther King’s martyrs for voting rights’ in Selma, Alabama. In 1966, the Republican Party staked its electoral fortunes on opposing open housing for blacks. Romney begged them, unsuccessfully, not to. “This fellow really means it,” an amazed Southern Republican said when Romney toured Dixie pushing civil rights in his presidential campaign; after America’s worst riot broke out in Detroit under his watch, the governor said that America could respond with a crackdown on law and order – “but our system would become little better than a police state.”
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Then, most famously, there was the Vietnam War. He supported it after returning from a trip there in 1965. Then, courageously, after a second trip in 1967, he began to criticize it. On September 4, 1967, a TV interviewer asked, “Isn’t your position a bit inconsistent with what it was, and what do you propose we do now?”
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The line everyone remembers from his response: “When I came back from Vietnam in 1965, I just had the greatest brainwashing anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam.” But he continued with a devastating, prophetic, and one-thousand-percent-correct assessment: that staying in Vietnam would be a disaster. The public, and certainly the pundits, weren’t ready to hear it. All they heard was the word “brainwashing” – not in the colloquial sense in which Romney obviously intended it, but as something literal… Romney nose-dived sixteen points in the next Harris poll. As I wrote in my book Nixonland, on Vietnam a national brainwashing continued apace.
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The Mormon bishop, however, did not quit. Instead he leapfrogged across New Hampshire telling unseasonable truths – that LBJ was “spinning a web of delusion,” and that “when you want to win the hearts and minds of people, you don’t kill them and destroy their property. You don’t use bombers and tanks and napalm to save them.”…
Check out the whole column, and decide for yourself whether the proper answer to the title should be “Not enough” or “All the wrong lessons”.
“What Mitt Romney Learned from His Father”Post + Comments (71)
“Everybody’s Second Choice”
Much excellent reportage at Esquire‘s Politics Blog today, including John Richardson taking a well-deserved victory lap concerning the second Mrs. Gingrich and Newton’s “character issues”. And Tom Junod on the GOP Establishment’s choice:
… Her name was Cindy Costa — “that’s the old-fashioned spelling of Cindy, not the New Age one.” She was here this morning because she had given her official endorsement to Mitt, and because she thought that his coronation was as inevitable as he did. She was celebratory, but also tense, because even as Mitt was talking up establishment Republicans, Rick Perry was dropping out of the race, and endorsing Newt Gingrich. “It doesn’t matter what happens here,” she said. “I still think he’s going to win South Carolina, but even if he doesn’t, he’s going to win the nomination. He’ll pick up as many Perry votes as Gingrich does, or Santorum. That’s because Mitt is everybody’s second choice.”
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And with that, the handsomely turned-out establishment Republican Cindy Costa had captured the strange appeal of Mitt Romney and at the same time explained the air of tense inevitability that surrounds his campaign. He is a blatantly inauthentic candidate for president — a guy whose fake laugh carries like a siren every time someone tries a joke; a guy who looks like he goes through life expecting a compliment, if not a crown; a guy who speaks of his father “becoming head of a car company” the way another candidate might speak of his father opening a hardware store; a guy whose supporters worry, as one of the establishment Republicans in the crowd worried aloud here this morning, that “he better sew up the nomination before people find out that he’s paying 15 percent because he’s making his money on carry trades”: that is, a form of currency manipulation. And yet if he is going to win the nomination because “he’s everybody’s second choice,” his very inauthenticity becomes his calling card, because it makes him less threatening than first-choice candidates like Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum.
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I mean, the Romney event wasn’t particularly inspiring; but at least it wasn’t weird. The Rick Santorum event three hours later? That was weird…
Much more at the link. Esquire‘s become my second-of-the-morning go-to political blog, right after this site… their coverage isn’t exhaustive, but it’s always informative and usually entertaining, too.
Open Thread: Willard the Well-Practiced Liar
(Mike Thompson via GoComics.com)
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In the Washington Post, DFH William D. Cohan (“He has worked at Lazard Freres, Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan Chase.”) says that when Romney ran Bain Capital, his word was not his bond. It’s well worth a read, especially for those touting Romney’s “business acumen” as his biggest asset as a candidate.
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In a post titled “The most glaring lie of the night“, Washington Monthly‘s Steve Benen points out that Romney still can’t be trusted:
It’s hard not to marvel at just how dishonest Mitt Romney is prepared to be in order to win. The notion of politicians misleading the public to advance their ambitions isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, but Romney acts as if he doesn’t even care about getting caught, leading to blatant and obvious falsehoods.
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This one, from last night’s debate, was just shameless.“We’ve got a president in office three years, and he does not have a jobs plan yet. I’ve got one out there already and I’m not even president, yet.”
Look, I realize Romney’s busy, and keeping up on current events may be difficult, but Obama delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress just four months ago, and at the time, presented a jobs plan. The whole thing has been online ever since. It’s been scrutinized, analyzed, and subjected to CBO scoring. It’s been debated; it’s been the subject of advertising; and it’s been voted on in the Senate….
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In all likelihood, of course, Romney knows full well that the president has presented a detailed and credible jobs plan, but prefers to say otherwise because he (a) assumes voters are easily fooled; and (b) expects the media to give him a pass. He may well be right.
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But that doesn’t make Romney’s dishonesty any less brazen.
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Postscript: Incidentally, the former governor with an abysmal jobs record added, as part of his comment, that he’s “got [a jobs plan] out there already.” He really doesn’t. Romney has a plan for cutting taxes on the wealthy and giving Wall Street free rein to do as it pleases, but this does not a jobs plan make.
And this, our Media Village overlords assure us, is the best of the available Republican candidates…
Open Thread: Willard the Well-Practiced LiarPost + Comments (63)
For Your Listening Pleasure
Required Reading, MLK Day edition
I’m ashamed to say that until Charlie Pierce in his own, powerful essay on MLK day pointed me to it, I had never actually read Lyndon B. Johnson’s speech to Congress urging — almost ordering — the legislators before him to pass the Voting Rghts Act.
Here’s a sample:
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.
Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil I know how agonizing racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society.
But a century has passed, more than a hundred years, since the Negro was freed. And he is not fully free tonight.
It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great President of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact.
A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since equality was promised. And yet the Negro is not equal.
A century has passed since the day of promise. And the promise is unkept.
The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American.
For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated, how many white families have lived in stark poverty, how many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we have wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror?
So I say to all of you here, and to all in the Nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future.
This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall overcome.
Pierce calls this “the greatest speech an American president has delivered in my lifetime.”
Mine too.
One last thought: One strand I draw from Johnson’s speech is that it is possible to have a politics that transcends the mere purchase and sale of interest; one in which words have both power and integrity.
I want that politics back.
Update: Boss Bitch points us to newly recovered audio of an MLK speech to an Ohio High School in 1967.
Image: Lyndon Baines Johnson with Martin Luther King on August 6, 1965, at the signing of the Voting Rights Act.