Skip to content

A tired meme

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Could it be that the Republican party is having trouble keeping young and up with the times? This is the party that for the last 40 years has beaten the Democrats so well at messaging that they manage to win their fair share of elections even though they (including the sainted Reagan) pretty much destroy the country every time they get near power.

But I detect some cracks; indications that they are resting on their laurels. It seems, in fact, for Republicans, it’s always 1980.

I read today that Romney called Obama “the most feckless president since Carter”.

Before I get to my main point, let me detour a bit. Apparently, Romney thinks Obama is not as feckless as Carter, or he’d have gone back to some other feckless president, like Coolidge, or said that Obama was more feckless than Carter. Since I assume all Republican presidents are, by definition, full of feck, this leaves Obama trailing only Clinton in feck among the Democrats since Carter. But the Republicans are positively embracing Clinton, so he too, is full of feck. Nowadays, the Republicans just can’t get enough of the guy they tried to impeach, and who my must-be-faulty memory still insists they thought was a criminal incompetent at the time. So, Obama has less feck than all those feckfull guys, meaning he may still have plenty of feck. All I can say is, that whatever point Romney was trying to make, he was pretty feckless in the way he went about making it.

But, I definitely digress; back to my main point. What’s with the Carter references? It’s been 32 years since he was president. Even the Democrats had stopped running against Herbert Hoover by 1964, and they had far more cause to do so. Besides, Hoover had pretty much slipped into a sullen retirement after his presidency. Not so with Carter. Voters that were 18 when he last ran are now 50, and a large share of the idiots that voted for his replacement are now dead. The man is just not perceived the way Republicans delude themselves into believing he is perceived. For most people, Carter is the nice man who builds houses, supervises elections, and says sensible things about the Arab-Israeli situation. The Carter gibe is more likely to be met by blank stares then anything else. Just one more sign that the Republican message operation needs an operating system upgrade.

Besides, “feckless” means incompetent, and everyone knows that Bush was the most feckless president in American history. He was so feckless that despite Romney’s fecklessness of the last few days and weeks, I still think Romney would have marginally more feck than Bush, though he’d do more harm than Bush since he’d be a slave to a Congress dominated by sociopaths and loonies. I really think Romney should stay away from the word, because people might look it up, and remind themselves that Romney’s incompetent campaign has gotten him where he is only because he ran against a field of fecklessness unprecedented in all of American history. Remember: Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachman, Hermann Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry. It’s hard to tell at this point whether Romney was the least incompetent or the shit floated to the top. Either way, Romney, a guy who couldn’t even go to England without pissing off the natives, really ought to avoid the topic.

Filed in Romney | | Comments (0)

Murphy Commercial

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Chris strikes back against Linda. It strikes me that the reaction to Romney’s negative campaigning may tarnish Linda as well. Yesterday someone showed me a mailing from Linda in which she used Susan Bysiewicz’s picture and passed on Susan’s inaccurate charge (Susan admitted she had mixed up her Murphys) that Chris was taking big time Wall Street money. I assume her defense will be that she was only quoting Susan, she wasn’t saying it was true.

Filed in Video | | Comments (0)

Romney Jumps the Shark

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Apparently Romney is being rightly condemned by almost everyone for trying to make political hay out of the killings in Libya, but I can’t agree with the argument made by Kos, (which may be tongue in cheek) that Romney had no choice but to attack. If you’re losing, you don’t intentionally go out and do something that will make your chances of losing even greater, and indeed, this may be the final straw for Romney, much like McCain was toast after pronouncing the economy’s fundamentals sound, and then proposing cancelling the campaign when it turned out he was just a tad wrong.

My own take is that Romney in particular, and the Republicans in general, have lost any sense that there are limits to how vicious and mean spirited you can be, particularly when the object of your venom is Obama. They have internalized the fringe attitude toward him, and believe that  attitude is shared by a broad cross section of their fellow citizens. None of us are immune from the belief that most other people feel the way we do, but things get dangerous when you start to believe that the minority to whom you are pandering (or to whom you were pandering until you began to half believe your own lies) hold broadly acceptable views.

Since their venom has been tolerated and even excused by the media, there has been no effective check on its verbalization, but that doesn’t mean what’s being verbalized has become any more widely believed. Now their weird world view has to actually produce votes, and they are coming up against the fact that most people don’t view Obama as anything other than what he is: a likable man trying to do his best in a bad situation he inherited from the people who despise him the most. Other than Republicans, few view him as an America hating closet Muslim. People like him even if they disagree with the policy choices he’s mde, so they don’t recognize the guy the right despises in the president they know. Because he’s known, all the money in the world is unlikely to shake their perceptions. Romney, on the other hand, is, as Kos says, a dick, and all the money in the world is having a hard time hiding that fact from the American people.

But the incident still illustrates the double standard that the media allows in this country. One could not criticize Bush in the days after 9/11, or for months after, on any subject, lest one be perceived as helping the terrorist. That extended to anyone asking for an investigation of the events leading up to the incident. Imagine, if you can, the reaction we would have heard if the titular head of the Democratic Party had blamed Bush for 9/11 the day it happened. The reaction to Romney is encouraging, but it pales in comparison to what would have happened had, for instance, John Kerry done something similar.

Filed in Romney | | Comments (0)

News Flash: Romney Flips

Monday, September 10, 2012

It is, perhaps, a measure of the extent to which Romney perceived the Democratic convention as a success,that he felt the need to try to pander on health care. He was, wasn’t, was, and then wasn’t again for preserving the ability of people with pre-existing conditions to get health care, until he finally settled to a classic Republican formulation: he is going to preserve insurance for people with a pre-existing condition as long as they already have health care. If you have no health care: tough. As Krugman points out, you can’t meaningfully perserve that one feature while repealing the others (arithmetic again), but when has arithmetic ever meant anything to Republicans, even “wonks” like Ryan.

I found this particular bit of dishonesty on Romney’s part rather puzzling. At this point, it’s highly unlikely that anyone who actually cares about health care will vote for the man, who after all heads a party that has insisted on repeal of the whole kit and caboodle. And make no mistake, if he’s elected, against what looks like big odds at the moment, it would mean the Republicans would control the entire government, as they would certainly take the Senate. At that point, the base will settle for nothing less than complete repeal. So what does Romney gain by even bothering to sound somewhat reasonable on health care? Are there enough gullible independents that might be swayed by this that it is worth antagonizing the base, which despite what the press may say, still doesn’t trust the man?

Josh Marshall thinks that, on this issue, Romney sometimes can’t help himself. He knows he actually did something right in Massachusetts, and he knows that Obama’s health care act (as flawed as many of us think it is) is a dead ringer for his own. So, sometimes, without thinking, he lets the truth slip, and then his minions have to do damage control. There may be some truth in that. It’s probably not easy to have that kind of cognitive dissonance building up inside you, even if you are as pathological a liar as Romney.

Filed in Romney | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music

Friday, September 7, 2012

As much as I might be tempted to play “Don’t Stop Thinkin’ about Tomorrow” in honor of the Big Dog, who gave a heck of a speech, though I will refrain from remarking on the Simpson Bowles reference, I am going to stick to my announced plan to feature songs that Republicans have been told not to play. This is a band I had never heard of, before I came across an article about the fact that they had demanded that Mitt Romney stop playing their song.

Silversun Pickups is the latest band to take issue with politicos in this election year. The alt-rock band from L.A. recently sent a cease and desist letter to presidential candidate Mitt Romney to stop using the group’s 2009 song “Panic Switch” at campaign functions. The Romney campaign said it won’t play the song again.

For the life of me I can’t imagine why anyone would play this song in connection with a political campaign. It’s not a bad song, but it isn’t exactly the type of music that’s going to motivate you to vote for someone, especially Mitt Romney.

Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

Rightward drift

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Eduardo Porter of the New York Times takes notes of the rightward drift in the location of our political center:

Interestingly, Americans say their political ideology has changed little since the late 1970s. The share of voters who defined themselves as liberal was 20 percent in 2010, up slightly from 19 percent in 1980, according to polls by The New York Times and CBS News. The conservative share over the same time rose to 35 percent, from 30 percent.

But these polls ignore how much the meanings of the terms have changed. The rightward drift in economic thinking becomes apparent in surveys asking about specific issues. In surveys 25 years ago, 71 percent of Americans believed it was the government’s job to take care of those who couldn’t care for themselves, according the Pew Research Center. This year the share is down to 59 percent. And most of the shift reflects a decline among Republicans.

(via New York Times)

This is something about which I’ve written time and again, but it’s nice to see the Times catch on, and clearly identify the party that has promoted that drift. I would take issue only with Porter’s suggestion that the drift has been, to a great extent, the result of inexorable forces unleashed by globalization. Those forces may have provided some cover, but it’s really more productive to follow Deep Throat’s advice, and follow the money. Right wing drift began and accelerated under Ronald Reagan, who, before (and after, for that matter) being elected governor of California, was a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric.

The rightward drift was, after all, accompanied by a massive transfer of wealth, which was itself accompanied by a massive propaganda campaign designed to convince us that government was evil and the rich, whether they be innovators, mere rent seekers, or heirs to the fortunes made by others, more deserving than the rest of us.

There is nothing about globalization that requires a tax policy that transfers wealth to the 1%, nor was globalization itself inevitable. It is, in the way it has been implemented, the result of policies of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. It is odd, is it not, that trade agreements can include provisions to protect patent monopolies or prevent countries from protecting their own environments when it interferes with corporate interests, but they can’t protect worker’s rights. These were matters of choice and negotiations (at least on the part of powerful countries like the US), not forces of nature.

Since the time of Reagan the lesser minds among us have been exposed to a barrage of right wing propaganda, spearheaded by Murdoch, but aided and abetted by the choice made, under right wing pressure, to abandon the fairness doctrine (thus giving the entire radio spectrum to the right) and by the other corporate media, which, besides turning their news divisions over to the entertainment divisions, treated us to a parade of pundits that constantly adjusted their own “centers” to align with the moving target they themselves manufactured. Since the right owns the media, it’s not surprising that Randians are permitted to bloviate ad nauseaum, but actual socialists will never be allowed to join the debate. The leftmost position allowed today occupies a point somewhat to the right of where LBJ stood 50 years ago. It’s already considered unreasonable among the centrists, for instance, for anyone to take the mathematically sound position that there’s nothing wrong with the social security system that a slight upward adjustment on the taxes of the rich wouldn’t fix, and the idea of single payer health care for all-you know–Medicare for the rest of us–is considered too radical to take seriously.

When all one hears is one side of an issue, or, to be generous, one side and a slightly more rational version of that same side, it is quite likely that one will start to believe that there is no other way to look at the issue, particularly if one is a Republican or an easily manipulable fundamentalist used to being fed his or her opinions. If unions are constantly demonized, a certain percentage of people will begin to believe, against all objective evidence, that union members are demons. If we are bombarded with paeans to the free market, we can even be made to believe, against all the evidence, that it’s a good idea to let profit driven corporations teach our kids or run our hospitals. Not all of us, of course, but as I noted the other day, they only need to fool most of us to get their way.

There is nothing about globalization that compels rightward drift. Were that the case, we would see it everywhere. We don’t. We are a nation which practically gave birth to free speech, but we have created a society in which the range of opinions permitted wide distribution is extremely narrow. This is not an accident. The range of opinions we are permitted to hear, and permitted to perceive as reasonable, are those that are broadly in the interests of the corporations, bankers, and the rest of the moneyed elite. It serves their interests to push economic policy to the right. They don’t much care about social policy, which is why we can have a political system that delivers right wing economic policies while drifting “left” (for this is how we’ve defined it) on issues such as gay marriage.

In short, the center has drifted right because the right owns the media, and the media gets to define the center.

Filed in Politics | | Comments (0)

Mitt: Profile in Courage

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

CNN gets it right:

“In 1968, France was a dangerous place to be for a 21-year-old American,” Borger says, “but Mitt Romney was right in the middle of it.”

(via Mediaite)

Not too many now remember the deep seated fear that we all had of going to France in ’68.

I remember.

The mass protests, the insistence that we be allowed to go to Vietnam instead. Anything to avoid the risks of fatty cheese and cheap wine. But Romney was a man with guts. He skillfully avoided Vietnam expressly to weather the greater risks of France, knowing full well, as the documentary shockingly reveals, that he would be risking occasional interruptions of electrical service and slow arriving checks from home. One can easily see why he demonstrated in favor of the draft. Was it too much to ask his social inferiors to bear the lesser risks of Vietnam while he, almost alone, took on France?

Filed in Media, Romney | | Comments (0)

All that’s necessary

Monday, September 3, 2012

Abe Lincoln was a smart guy, but I was reminded, while reading this in a Kos post, that he could sometimes get it wrong:

Romney wants to test one of this nation’s most famous political maxims, as he attempts to fool all of the people all of the time.

(via Daily Kos)

Abe was right, as far as he went. But the fact is that you don’t need to fool all of the people all of the time. The Republican’s, and Romney’s, aim is more modest: to fool most of the people all of the time. But even that isn’t necessary. It suffices quite well to fool most of the people most of the time, and the fact is, they’ve succeeded admirably at that. It helps, of course, to have a base that you can fool all of the time.

Filed in Republicans | | Comments (0)

Register

Saturday, September 1, 2012

The Obama campaign and the Democrats are doing something you won’t find on any Republican site: making it easy (or as easy as they can, considering the Republican’s ongoing voter suppression) to vote. They are distributing open source code that anyone can use to register. For reasons I can’t fathom, I can’t seem to make the form “sticky”, so that it stay as a lead article, but I’m hoping this post will stay put. Click on the register link to the right and vote Democratic.

Filed in Announcements | | Comments (0)

In Defense of Paul Ryan

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Yes, I know it seems unlikely, but when a guy is unfairly traduced, it’s my duty to defend him, whether he’s a smarmy, lying toady for the rich or not. So I just can’t stand silent while Ryan is unfairly called a world class liar just because he claimed to have run a sub three hour marathon and claimed to run multiple marathons when he’s actually run only one, and he almost broke four hours, but not quite.

Look, I’ve both swum and run competitively. I can easily understand how Ryan’s memory might have become a little hazy, so it’s not like he was lying this time, he was just mis-remembering.

I mean, even now, I can’t remember how many marathons I’ve run. It might be zero, or it might be six or seven. How can I be expected to remember something like that? Or take my swimming career, during which I’m fairly sure that I broke 4 minutes for the 400 yard freestyle. Maybe I’m remembering wrong. Maybe it was six minutes, and maybe I never did that, possibly, but really, when you consider that two minutes in relation to the age of the universe (which Ryan will now no doubt tell you is as much as 6,000 years), what’s the difference, and who can be expected to remember such trivialities?

The important point is that at the time he said what he said, Ryan believed it to be true, or, just as legitimately, believed that it should be true and that it could become true, if he said it. How was he to know that some reporter at Runner’s World would act like a journalist and check in to his claim, after he’d grown used to reporters in Washington? 

So let’s all lay off the guy. He lives in a world in which truthiness is all, and in that world, he ran as fast as he said he did, or even faster.

Oh, and Al Gore is still a liar for saying he invented the internet, even though he didn’t say that, and that lie reveals much about his character, even though it wasn’t a lie. But as to Ryan, his conversion of fantasy to truth tells us nothing.

Filed in Republicans | | Comments (0)