Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

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

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Consistently wrong since 2002

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Nepotism in the GOP

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When its inhabitants call the state Misery… Yes, Jay is in fact the son of John Ashcroft, Dubya’s choice for U.S. Attorney General and “the only U.S. Senator defeated for re-election by a dead person”.

But Jay will never reach the fathomless depths achieved by Willard Romney, son of that vanished species, a *decent* Republican…

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Mitt Romney Exits, Stage Right

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Mitt Romney Exits, Stage Right

(Clay Jones via GoComics.com)

 
There will not be a Republican politician like Romney again, the pundits keep saying, and as far as I’m concerned this is not much of a loss. Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney was a bog-standard GOP Business Representative born a generation too late. Apart from a few belated spasms concerning Trump’s distastefully parvenu behavior, his voting record was indistinguishable from the GOP mean (in every sense of the term). He’s certainly old enough to retire while he can enjoy bullying just his extended family, and if my closest work colleague was Mike Lee(… roy Jenkins!), I’d quit too.


But let’s hear from another and far more eloquent Masshole:

… Politics has been such a disappointment to Mitt Romney. There always are so many…people involved.

He ran against Ted Kennedy, and those…people turned him down. He became governor of Massachusetts, passed a health-care law, and then tried to muscle Republicans into the state legislature only to have…people return more Democrats than were in there before. So, having lost interest in his day job, he ran for president in 2008, only to incur the profound dislike of his fellow candidates and the resounding loathing of the…people in general. In 2012, he thought he had it won only to have those…people deny him his rightful place at the pinnacle of power. Then came Trump, and Mitt Romney lost all hope in common humanity and got elected to the Senate from Utah, where he at least voted for both impeachments of the former president*. Now, he leaves the scene secure in the wisdom that has guided his entire public career — that there are two kinds of Americans: Him, and Everybody Else.

He was as maladroit a public politician as I’ve ever seen. And it took me while to realize that it wasn’t a lack of natural skills that accounted for that, it was the fact that Romney decided never to learn them. He was rich and he was handsome and he was the son of a beloved liberal Republican, and that was always enough to insulate him from the grubbier aspects of his chosen hobby. And he could always walk away.

This time, of course, he has legitimate reasons for walking away. He’d be over 80 by the time his next term was over, and his re-election campaign was going to be tougher due to his public opposition to the former president*. It was going to require some serious retail politics, and the Romneys haven’t paid retail for generations. But he will stand in history as a great missed opportunity. He had a lot of the wherewithal needed to keep the Republican Party from itself, if he only cared enough to do it.

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Friday Night Open Thread: Mitt Romney Considers Himself A Man of Destiny

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Romney is a sociopath, IMO, but he’s not stupid. He considered another six years spent surrounded by the mouthbreathers, internet gremlins, and conspiracy fanatics of the modern GOP death cult — people like his fellow Utan Senator Mike Lee (… roy Jenkins!), even assuming he wasn’t successfully primaried by another of that ilk. And he decided, sensibly enough, to instead announce his retirement and a (so far quite successful) “Nothing Became Him So Much As His Manner of Departure” farewell tour.

(McKay Coppins, if you don’t recognize the name, is a nice Mormon journalist with a talent for getting right-wingers to say unguarded things. I won’t buy his Romney bio, but I’ll read the inevitable media extracts with great interest.)

This is the nut graf that’s been exciting so many people:

… It begins with a text message from Angus King, the junior senator from Maine: “Could you give me a call when you get a chance? Important.”

Romney calls, and King informs him of a conversation he’s just had with a high-ranking Pentagon official. Law enforcement has been tracking online chatter among right-wing extremists who appear to be planning something bad on the day of Donald Trump’s upcoming rally in Washington, D.C. The president has been telling them the election was stolen; now they’re coming to steal it back. There’s talk of gun smuggling, of bombs and arson, of targeting the traitors in Congress who are responsible for this travesty. Romney’s name has been popping up in some frightening corners of the internet, which is why King needed to talk to him. He isn’t sure Romney will be safe.

Romney hangs up and immediately begins typing a text to Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. McConnell has been indulgent of Trump’s deranged behavior over the past four years, but he’s not crazy. He knows that the election wasn’t stolen, that his guy lost fair and square. He sees the posturing by Republican politicians for what it is. He’ll want to know about this, Romney thinks. He’ll want to protect his colleagues, and himself.

Romney sends his text: “In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th. There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.”

McConnell never responds.…

And Romney… shrugged and kept his mouth shut. Like a good GOP soldier.

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Late Night Open Thread: Retvrn to the Uncanny Valley

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Now that the Jan6 Committee has exposed so many Republican ‘stars’ as criminals, enablers, and/or idiots, the GOP is desperate for a figurehead that ‘swing voters’ won’t immediately assume would try to rape their kids, beat up their mixed-race family members, or steal their wallets.

Since Willard Romney could only be suspected of that last crime (and of course he’d do it in the most business-friendly MBA-speak terms!), ever-hopeful Repub mouthpieces are trying to start a cult of St. Mitt, Beloved Centrist Moderate. Even for such experienced liars, that’s quite a lift!

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GOP Stupidity Open Thread: Mitt Romney Has Nothing to Worry About

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And CPAC was never exactly Mitt’s kinda people anyways. Remember when we could make fun of the grifters, resume-padders and grievance voters who hung around that event like flies circling carrion?

I wish I could remember which twitter wit referred to Matt Schlapp as ‘the sound made by two porkchops falling onto a wet kitchen floor.’

These Trump remoras can’t make me like Mitt Romney, but they’re making me more sympathetic to the general, near-extinct class of Honorable Republicans.

Mitt’s an upper-class Mormon. He grew up in a wealthy suburb in Michigan, moved to Massachusetts for college and to New York to make his fortune, moved back to Massachusetts to jump-start his political career because ‘nobody elects a president from Utah‘. He still has multi-million-dollar ‘family vacation homes’ in California and New Hampshire. But his primary loyalty has always been to his class and his faith, not necessarily in that order, and there’s no better place on earth for a well-to-do Mormon of impeccable LDS lineage than the state of Utah. They don’t care what that vulgar gentile in the White House thinks, although they’ll dutifully pull the (R) lever during the general election.

If you don’t trust my insight, McKay Coppins is also a Mormon:

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Open Thread: Mitt Romney, (Would Be) Man on A White Horse

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This is physically painful for me — I’m grinding my teeth right now — but if he can actually bring himself to step up and lead a GOP challenge against the Oval Office Occupant, then props to Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor & current Utah Senator:

… According to sources, donors have in recent days called the Utah senator and encouraged him to run against Trump in the primary. “There is a half-billion dollars on the sidelines from guys who are fed up with Trump,” a GOP donor told me. Their hopes were raised when Romney attacked Trump on Friday, tweeting: “By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.” Former White House communications director turned Trump antagonist Anthony Scaramucci tweeted a poll showing Romney beating Trump 55% to 37% in a hypothetical primary. Trump fired back on Saturday. “Mitt Romney never knew how to win,” Trump tweeted. “He is a pompous ‘ass’ who has been fighting me from the beginning, except when he begged me for my endorsement for his Senate run (I gave it to him), and when he begged me to be Secretary of State (I didn’t give it to him). He is so bad for R’s!”

According to people close to Romney, he’s firmly decided against primarying Trump, an enterprise he believes to be a sure loser given Trump’s enduring GOP support. Romney has also told people that, as an unsuccessful two-time presidential candidate, he’s the wrong person to take on Trump. Instead, a Romney adviser told me, Romney believes he has more potential power as a senator who will decide Trump’s fate in an impeachment trial. “He could have tremendous influence in the impeachment process as the lone voice of conscience in the Republican caucus,” the adviser said. In recent days, Romney has been reaching out privately to key players in the Republican resistance, according to a person briefed on the conversations. “Romney is the one guy who could bring along Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, Ben Sasse. Romney is the pressure point in the impeachment process. That’s why the things he’s saying are freaking Republicans out.” (Romney, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.)

GOP elected officials and donors are privately war-gaming what an endgame for Trump would look like. “It’s clear the House is going to impeach,” the prominent Republican told me. Making matters worse for Trump, a policy wedge has opened up between Trump and the Republican Senate at a moment when he needs its support most. Trump’s surprise decision to pull back American troops in Syria and allow Turkey to take on our Kurdish allies has enraged Trump’s closest GOP allies, including Lindsey Graham. “The Syria decision is a much bigger deal,” another former West Wing official said. “No one on the inside can hold Trump accountable. The Senate Republicans are the only check on power right now.”

What say the political touts? Well, Chris ‘Mad Bitcher’ Cillizza is visibly excited by the possibilities for media-worthy strife (as of course he would be). And the Boston Globe reports that some name-brand Never-Trumpers are clapping for Romney already. Then there’s the Never-Trumpist house organ, The Bulwark:

… [W]hat if—hear me out—Mitt Romney is the only person in America who is capable of saving the Republican party from itself, and in the process, saving the world from the current occupant of the Oval Office?

Lest we forget, Romney is a former Bain Capital man, and if there is one thing private equity knows, it’s how to read the numbers—and the writing on the wall…

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Open Thread: An Interlude with Willard “Mitt” Romney

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Mitt Romney is running for the Senate again, this time from his spiritual home in Utah. (Extra points to Murphy the Trickster God’s lack of discrimination for arranging that his GOP primary opponent will be named Kennedy — no relation to the Masshole clan.) People who know these things agree that Mitt will walk away with the nomination, and therefore in Repub-friendly Utah the election. After which, Mitt says, he will be A Strong Voice against that terrible, lawless RINO now occupying the Oval Office… please do not bring up the unfortunate frog-legs dinner.

So Romney is once again doing interviews, which continue to be… well…

My immediate thought was ‘I prefer things that seem to have been factory-produced, like me’.

Mr. Charles P. Pierce believes this is pandering, done badly. (“Have some respect for the craft, Willard.”)

Me, I believe it is a glimpse at the sad soul of our former Governor, a high-end formed-meat product in a world increasingly divided between those who won’t touch the nasty things, and those who prefer their meat products as cheaply and obviously mass-produced as possible.

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