JUST as I wish the death of Trayvon Martin was something unusual. The reader is reminded that the state of Florida finds all sorts of ways to facilitate the deaths of black teenagers, and excuse the perpetrators.
I think that, for once, the President's measured tone was correct. We don't need a public execution of George Zimmerman. We don't even need some self-appointed expert to hear Zimmerman say "coon". Whether George Zimmerman is a raving Kluxer, a closet bigot, or a misguided gun nut is a matter for the courts. And he and his gun are nowhere near the courts at present.
We don't know why Zimmerman pulled the trigger. We do know why he was well-known to the local police for parading around like a self-appointed sidewalk security guard: because the state of Florida told him he could. And it told him he could precisely because, like many states--and leave us make no mistake about it, not just in the South--it has pursued a Jim Crow By Any Other Name policy since 1964.
We know this. We've sat still for it. We watched while the Press faux-balanced the retrenchment of institutional racism with specious claims of "reverse" racism. We listened to the "debate" over whether the Willie Horton ads were racist. We've seen the New York Times give prime Op-Ed space to a man who would publicly deny there could possibly be anything suspicious about Ronald Reagan's Philadelphia Experiment.
We've seen fall-back position after fall-back position, and heard equal time given to the denouncers of "race pimps" and "liberals, the real racists". We've watched the Republican party--not exclusively--try to turn Equality into a "special interest", and we've watched the Democratic party--not exclusively--run from African-American support.
Let's just say this: we might disagree about when deadly force is justified. We might disagree about how much force one is permitted when defending not life but property. We cannot pretend that an unarmed teenager shot in the head because some citizen thought he might be virtually threatening someone else's virtual property has died in a way any civilized society worthy of the name can accept.
Monday, March 26
Friday, March 23
Dick Doesn't Live Here Anymore
I MAY have mentioned here that my only rooting interest in the vaunted Teabagger Challenge to 109-term Indiana Senator Richard "Nixon's Favorite Mayor, and Peggy Eaton's Favorite Dinner Guest" Lugar was for a stage collapse during a debate. I was lying; I knew that Lugar would be too smart to debate Indiana state treasurer and flaky white biscuit Richard Mourdock. He's made about every other stupid move he possibly could, though.
For one thing, taking the man seriously. Mourdock's only qualification for his present job is that he's as mazed as the people who give him money. (It's Mourdock, by the way, who is nominally responsible for Indiana's $300 million lost-and-found game with public funds, aka The Precise Amount the Mitch "CEO" Daniels Administration Cut From Public Education "Because We Didn't Have It".)
Lord only knows what sort of war chest Lugar's been sitting on for the past sixty years; some of it must be in pieces-of-eight. He's never had a serious electoral challenge from a Democrat, because Indiana (not that Jim Jontz wasn't a good guy). Hell, he once ran unopposed, except by the Libertarian/Free Silver coalition. Every six years he'd turn loose of something like sixty bucks to put up a few Glamour Shots ads, touting his positive attitude, his Eagle Scout merit badges, and nothing about Nixon, reminding Hoosiers how lucky they were to have a real statesman in their corner, a brave internationalist in the fight against everybody else's nuclear arsenal, and a Senator who didn't demean himself by taking committee chairmanships that were important to his state, or saving its military bases, like all those other guys did.
But then the Senate hurt Evan Bayh's feelings, and in the resultant battle to find another Republican to replace him, the Teabagger candidate and recipient of Federal agricultural largessStanley Myron Handleman Marlin Stutzman got his feathers mussed by Dan "The Beige Carpetbag" Coats. (Never fear; all Stutzman had to do was wait for the next Republican sex scandal to create an opening, in this case Mark Souder's 3rd District seat.) So, on the grounds that all superannuated white guys look alike, the Teabaggers announced their intention to go after the treasonous Lugar, who has only voted their way 93% of the time since the Long Depression.
What grounds Lugar had for taking this seriously I don't know; fer chrissakes, Dan Coats beat their guy in 2010, and he was a professional lobbyist and gratuity collector who didn't even live in the state.
Then again, as it turns out, neither does Lugar.
Lugar began running ads--incessantly--calling Mourdock a mud-slinger, thereby wisely drawing attention to whatever well the Teabaggers were shouting this stuff down. There's a real cautionary tale here. Or maybe a couple. First and foremost, if you're going to hold public office for eight or ten generations, it's probably best not to fill your staffing needs with an in-house inbreeding system. What this new generation of Lugarites is up to is anyone's guess, but turning Everybody's Kindly Old Great-Grandpa into a political shit-slinger has had the appropriate results; Lugar now looks like his colostomy bag exploded.
Mourdock began with the usual crap. "Obama's Favorite Republican!" "Lugar Doesn't Support Hoosiers' Second Amendment Rights To Gun Down Abortionists!" Lugar responded with ads insisting he hates Barack Hussein Obama as much as anybody, and, my personal favorite, that he voted for a Balanced Budget Amendment seventeen times. Okay, so his people are at least savvy enough to know that Irony is going right over the primary voter's head.
Then Mourdock's crew trotted out the one about how Lugar hasn't lived here since 1977.
Which is old news, and pretty much settled law; we've gone over this a couple of times since, and the GOP sure wasn't concerned that Dan Coats hadn't lived here since he went to Congress the first time. Except--oh oh!--Lugar's voted twice to require IDs for federal elections (though I suppose he didn't specify accurate IDs). And for the first state in the nation whose Republicans demanded IDs from voters, unless they were running as Republicans for Secretary of State, it doesn't really look all that good that our senior Senator has been listing that house he sold during the Carter administration as his legal voting address ever since. This, naturally, led to immediate demands from the state GOP that Lugar be brought up on felony vote fraud charges.
I mean, get the Presidential Medal of Freedom next time there's a Bush in the Oval Office. But the Marion County Election Board has a Democratic majority, and last week it stripped his registration. This is known as partisan politics.
Then yesterday the Lugar campaign announced that he'd be repaying $4500 wrongly siphoned from taxpayers to pay for hotel rooms in Indiana while the Senate was not in session, going back to 1991, "as far back as records go."
Oh, the other cautionary tale: y'know, if you're really such an all-out moderate, maybe the time to say something when your party goes crackers is when it happens, not thirty years later, when it happens to you.
For one thing, taking the man seriously. Mourdock's only qualification for his present job is that he's as mazed as the people who give him money. (It's Mourdock, by the way, who is nominally responsible for Indiana's $300 million lost-and-found game with public funds, aka The Precise Amount the Mitch "CEO" Daniels Administration Cut From Public Education "Because We Didn't Have It".)
Lord only knows what sort of war chest Lugar's been sitting on for the past sixty years; some of it must be in pieces-of-eight. He's never had a serious electoral challenge from a Democrat, because Indiana (not that Jim Jontz wasn't a good guy). Hell, he once ran unopposed, except by the Libertarian/Free Silver coalition. Every six years he'd turn loose of something like sixty bucks to put up a few Glamour Shots ads, touting his positive attitude, his Eagle Scout merit badges, and nothing about Nixon, reminding Hoosiers how lucky they were to have a real statesman in their corner, a brave internationalist in the fight against everybody else's nuclear arsenal, and a Senator who didn't demean himself by taking committee chairmanships that were important to his state, or saving its military bases, like all those other guys did.
But then the Senate hurt Evan Bayh's feelings, and in the resultant battle to find another Republican to replace him, the Teabagger candidate and recipient of Federal agricultural largess
What grounds Lugar had for taking this seriously I don't know; fer chrissakes, Dan Coats beat their guy in 2010, and he was a professional lobbyist and gratuity collector who didn't even live in the state.
Then again, as it turns out, neither does Lugar.
Lugar began running ads--incessantly--calling Mourdock a mud-slinger, thereby wisely drawing attention to whatever well the Teabaggers were shouting this stuff down. There's a real cautionary tale here. Or maybe a couple. First and foremost, if you're going to hold public office for eight or ten generations, it's probably best not to fill your staffing needs with an in-house inbreeding system. What this new generation of Lugarites is up to is anyone's guess, but turning Everybody's Kindly Old Great-Grandpa into a political shit-slinger has had the appropriate results; Lugar now looks like his colostomy bag exploded.
Mourdock began with the usual crap. "Obama's Favorite Republican!" "Lugar Doesn't Support Hoosiers' Second Amendment Rights To Gun Down Abortionists!" Lugar responded with ads insisting he hates Barack Hussein Obama as much as anybody, and, my personal favorite, that he voted for a Balanced Budget Amendment seventeen times. Okay, so his people are at least savvy enough to know that Irony is going right over the primary voter's head.
Then Mourdock's crew trotted out the one about how Lugar hasn't lived here since 1977.
Which is old news, and pretty much settled law; we've gone over this a couple of times since, and the GOP sure wasn't concerned that Dan Coats hadn't lived here since he went to Congress the first time. Except--oh oh!--Lugar's voted twice to require IDs for federal elections (though I suppose he didn't specify accurate IDs). And for the first state in the nation whose Republicans demanded IDs from voters, unless they were running as Republicans for Secretary of State, it doesn't really look all that good that our senior Senator has been listing that house he sold during the Carter administration as his legal voting address ever since. This, naturally, led to immediate demands from the state GOP that Lugar be brought up on felony vote fraud charges.
I mean, get the Presidential Medal of Freedom next time there's a Bush in the Oval Office. But the Marion County Election Board has a Democratic majority, and last week it stripped his registration. This is known as partisan politics.
Then yesterday the Lugar campaign announced that he'd be repaying $4500 wrongly siphoned from taxpayers to pay for hotel rooms in Indiana while the Senate was not in session, going back to 1991, "as far back as records go."
Oh, the other cautionary tale: y'know, if you're really such an all-out moderate, maybe the time to say something when your party goes crackers is when it happens, not thirty years later, when it happens to you.
Wednesday, March 21
Campaign 2012: Hyperreality Is Setting In
FIRST, as is so often the case, our guide to how these people think is Young Middle-Ager and Young Teenage Beard Enthusiast Ross Douthat , who has all he can handle (and more) with sounding semi-rational, and can't put much effort into cosmetics.
(By the way, I don't say "semi-rational" just to be insulting; it's past time that Douthat, and his former asylum mate Megan Jane Howard-Roark, admit, for the good of the country, that they're crazier'n a griddleful of fleas, and run off and do whatever the progeny of the Wannabe Quality are supposed to do. There never was a time when we needed their opinions on anything, and now that time is past. I just found out a day or two ago that, prior to Douthat's mother's dissatisfaction that medical science did not solve her problem in 48 hours, which is what led to the entire family becoming snake handlers (the part of the bio I did know), they'd been Episcopalians, which is where wealthy WASPs go if the Romans seem a little too ethnic. Then they all became Catholics, the late conversion presumably explaining how Ross can write a column about the Kennedy Cult without throwing up in his own mouth. This sort of thing apparently is filed by the sort of East Coast snobs who employ such people as "being religious" when, in fact, anyone with any sense of religion can tell you it's fucking cracked. Changing religions is one thing. Accepting the theological shift from Episcopalianism to glossolalia is an undertaking that should require an alpenstock, if not a written test; switching to Catholicism from there is prima facie evidence that one hasn't been paying attention to anything, or maybe was just tripping out on the stained glass. This is not a condemnation of Young Ross, who presumably had no choice in the matter. Nor, really, is it meant as a condemnation of whatever family dynamic was at work, however Scripturally mazed. It's to note that a succession of religious officials in the 80s and 90s felt no compunction about accepting into the Fold a group which was clearly marooned on some coconut island of the mind. Budweiser is choosier about who can be seen with its product.)
Douthat has been assigned to write for this Times campaign blog, which advertises itself as offering Strong Opinions, though he's yet to cough up anything resembling an Opinion, let along one of strength. Today, Young Ross would like you to know that, having read this guy in the Weekly Standard--and please, won't somebody at the Times forbid Douthat from linking to the wingnuts who do his real thinking for him?--we can conclude that while Mitt Romney is pretty awful, he's still better than the Republican alternatives. The poets call this sort of insight "trenchant".
The fun part of the piece--I'm kiddin' ya; there isn't one--is that Douthat starts off bemoaning the fact that Poor Mitt has won Decisive Contest after Decisive Contest while the Media blatantly ignored the fact, then proceeds to analyze the "failures" of the Romney campaign as told by the Conventional Wisdom.
Still hungering for the real pungent stuff I head over to Slate, where John Dickerson can usually be counted on. To say the same things as William Saletan.
Listen, you don't have to tell me that "conservative" has no actual meaning in contemporary American politics, but if you're obliged to use it anyway, could you do so with some consistency? When people say "Romney will have trouble with conservatives" they mean the red meat, gun-totin', Jebus-spouting neo-Confederates who make up a third of the party, not "self-described conservative" members of the "conservative" party. This exchanges something approximating "reality" for the more comforting one in which people like John Dickerson don't have to call those people "nuts".
If Willard Mitt is the shoo-in nominee, then "conservatives" like him, in considerable numbers. He's certainly tailored his message to the extreme end of the Republican spectrum (though some--me, fer instance--would argue that's a spectrum with only one end), while trying to preserve what room there is to tack towards the "center" in the General. That--clearly, now--is what the "conservative" party has voted for in this primary season. Let's call this what it is: Mitt Romney is, in public, as "conservative" as most of his party, and its pundits, are comfortable to admitting to in polite society. This is the "rift" in the party: half of it believes a third of it is an enormous vat of guano.
Jeb has since done so; we'll see what sort of "conservative" circles this means anything in. Daniels ain't exactly beloved of the sort of people who don't like Mitt; maybe somebody could explain this to Mr. Dickerson. Break the news that Haley Barbour is as toxic as the lower half of the Mississippi to him gently; a good script is a horrible thing to have to toss out all at once.
This may've been the score four years ago, when the skid marks Mitt Romney had left in turning "conservative" were still fresh, warm, and redolent of plastic; today he's Mitt Romney, nobody's sweetheart, and no liberal except to the knuckle-draggers of his own party. Fifty-one percent, or something approximating that, have repudiated them, at least as regards selection of a national candidate. The same thing happened last time, except last time the "real" "conservatives" had only tax-raisin' Mike Huckabee to carry the banner; this time they've had a half-dozen to chose from, all duds. It's time to acknowledge that Mitt Romney is the face of the national Republican party, or the face it wishes to show the rest of the country, neatly coiffed, tone-deaf, and vacant behind the eyes, rather than the ravening Bronze Age thinkers who represent 40% of its voters and most of it Congressional representatives. It's the party which now admits that addled oligarchy, however unpopular, has to run things because that's preferable to the alternative. Time for the rest of y'all to say so, too.
(By the way, I don't say "semi-rational" just to be insulting; it's past time that Douthat, and his former asylum mate Megan Jane Howard-Roark, admit, for the good of the country, that they're crazier'n a griddleful of fleas, and run off and do whatever the progeny of the Wannabe Quality are supposed to do. There never was a time when we needed their opinions on anything, and now that time is past. I just found out a day or two ago that, prior to Douthat's mother's dissatisfaction that medical science did not solve her problem in 48 hours, which is what led to the entire family becoming snake handlers (the part of the bio I did know), they'd been Episcopalians, which is where wealthy WASPs go if the Romans seem a little too ethnic. Then they all became Catholics, the late conversion presumably explaining how Ross can write a column about the Kennedy Cult without throwing up in his own mouth. This sort of thing apparently is filed by the sort of East Coast snobs who employ such people as "being religious" when, in fact, anyone with any sense of religion can tell you it's fucking cracked. Changing religions is one thing. Accepting the theological shift from Episcopalianism to glossolalia is an undertaking that should require an alpenstock, if not a written test; switching to Catholicism from there is prima facie evidence that one hasn't been paying attention to anything, or maybe was just tripping out on the stained glass. This is not a condemnation of Young Ross, who presumably had no choice in the matter. Nor, really, is it meant as a condemnation of whatever family dynamic was at work, however Scripturally mazed. It's to note that a succession of religious officials in the 80s and 90s felt no compunction about accepting into the Fold a group which was clearly marooned on some coconut island of the mind. Budweiser is choosier about who can be seen with its product.)
Douthat has been assigned to write for this Times campaign blog, which advertises itself as offering Strong Opinions, though he's yet to cough up anything resembling an Opinion, let along one of strength. Today, Young Ross would like you to know that, having read this guy in the Weekly Standard--and please, won't somebody at the Times forbid Douthat from linking to the wingnuts who do his real thinking for him?--we can conclude that while Mitt Romney is pretty awful, he's still better than the Republican alternatives. The poets call this sort of insight "trenchant".
The fun part of the piece--I'm kiddin' ya; there isn't one--is that Douthat starts off bemoaning the fact that Poor Mitt has won Decisive Contest after Decisive Contest while the Media blatantly ignored the fact, then proceeds to analyze the "failures" of the Romney campaign as told by the Conventional Wisdom.
Still hungering for the real pungent stuff I head over to Slate, where John Dickerson can usually be counted on. To say the same things as William Saletan.
Romney will argue that he is "bringing the party together," a claim that rests on whether enough people believe that he is acceptable to conservatives. He got some evidence in Illinois to help him make his case. Romney won his usual constituencies—moderates, the wealthy, and the well-educated. But he also improved his performance among the 64 percent who identify themselves as "conservatives." Romney won 47 percent of that group to Santorum’s 39 percent. He also won 47 percent of the vote from those who support the Tea Party to Santorum’s 36 percent.
Listen, you don't have to tell me that "conservative" has no actual meaning in contemporary American politics, but if you're obliged to use it anyway, could you do so with some consistency? When people say "Romney will have trouble with conservatives" they mean the red meat, gun-totin', Jebus-spouting neo-Confederates who make up a third of the party, not "self-described conservative" members of the "conservative" party. This exchanges something approximating "reality" for the more comforting one in which people like John Dickerson don't have to call those people "nuts".
If Willard Mitt is the shoo-in nominee, then "conservatives" like him, in considerable numbers. He's certainly tailored his message to the extreme end of the Republican spectrum (though some--me, fer instance--would argue that's a spectrum with only one end), while trying to preserve what room there is to tack towards the "center" in the General. That--clearly, now--is what the "conservative" party has voted for in this primary season. Let's call this what it is: Mitt Romney is, in public, as "conservative" as most of his party, and its pundits, are comfortable to admitting to in polite society. This is the "rift" in the party: half of it believes a third of it is an enormous vat of guano.
But if Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, or Haley Barbour put their arm around Romney, it would generate some coverage in conservative circles and perhaps that would translate to even more lopsided wins in future states.
Jeb has since done so; we'll see what sort of "conservative" circles this means anything in. Daniels ain't exactly beloved of the sort of people who don't like Mitt; maybe somebody could explain this to Mr. Dickerson. Break the news that Haley Barbour is as toxic as the lower half of the Mississippi to him gently; a good script is a horrible thing to have to toss out all at once.
This may've been the score four years ago, when the skid marks Mitt Romney had left in turning "conservative" were still fresh, warm, and redolent of plastic; today he's Mitt Romney, nobody's sweetheart, and no liberal except to the knuckle-draggers of his own party. Fifty-one percent, or something approximating that, have repudiated them, at least as regards selection of a national candidate. The same thing happened last time, except last time the "real" "conservatives" had only tax-raisin' Mike Huckabee to carry the banner; this time they've had a half-dozen to chose from, all duds. It's time to acknowledge that Mitt Romney is the face of the national Republican party, or the face it wishes to show the rest of the country, neatly coiffed, tone-deaf, and vacant behind the eyes, rather than the ravening Bronze Age thinkers who represent 40% of its voters and most of it Congressional representatives. It's the party which now admits that addled oligarchy, however unpopular, has to run things because that's preferable to the alternative. Time for the rest of y'all to say so, too.
Tuesday, March 20
Olio: There's A Surprise, Vol. MMMCCCVI Edition
• Mitch "My Five Favorite Authors are Ayn Rand" Daniels' second-biggest gift to untold future generations of Hoosiers is the Rockport Coal Gasification plant deal, in which "we" agree to buy $7 billion in natural gas from Leucadia, and the insider holding company (but I repeat myself) agrees to build a plant the market has no need for. Two things we should about Leucadia. First, its market cap is about $8 billion, and its total assets around $9.3 billion, so we might as well have just bought the whole shebang if it was such a great fucking deal. Of course that's not the way the Free Market works.
the public exploded in outrage that we were criticizing an American soldier. A war which had been politicized for five years, a conflict which had been lied about for more than a decade, and one as redolent of racism as the Birmingham Transit Company had reached the pinnacle of facile cold-bloodedness, of the sort of thing we accused our enemies of, the sort of thing we'd fought the Nazis for.
The second is that its point man in Indiana is Mark Lubbers, the ultimate Indiana Republican fixer. This takes me back to the days when his boy Mitch Roob was an IBM insider, just before the Daniels administration bought a billion-dollars worth of failure for the Family and Social Services Administration, Mitch Roob, executive director. It's great having an economic genius like Daniels for governor; he can get you so many great deals just from knowing the right people.
Anyway, golly, we voted, or "voted", Leucadia a bunch of tax breaks, back when the Indiana General Assembly was doing all it could to make Mitch Daniels a viable Presidential candidate, because assuming all the business risk for the venture didn't quite make it profitable enough.
And now, four years later the thing's still sitting on the drawing board, cost overruns have nearly doubled the price of the plant (a Daniels specialty; he practiced on the Iraq War, and jumped in on the construction of the new Football Barn just in time to lose the emergency operating fund under the cushions), and the price of natural gas--the locus of the "$4 billion in savings" future Hoosiers would receive, minus, probably, a few incidental fees owed to the resellers--has continued to plummet. Who knew? asks the man who, when his last big multi-generation scheme, the peddling of the Indiana Toll Road, didn't earn the interest he'd already spent because the bond markets tanked, asked "Who knew?"
When the World's Third-Worst State Legislature™, which now has no further use for Daniels, and has spent the last two sessions pre-ingratiating itself with Choirboy Mike Pence, balked on continuing to help fund the boondoggle it helped create three years ago, Daniels pretty much announced he'd continue the tax breaks anyway, by the Indiana equivalent of a Bush signing statement.
It's actually gonna work out fine, though, as Lubbers points out:
Lubbers said the gas industry is about to undergo a huge consolidation, with 10 large companies dominating the market. That will end the long slide in natural gas prices, as big players get more pricing power.
"That will bring enormous stability to the price for natural gas," Lubbers said. "When that happens, this project and this contract will be great for Indiana consumers."
The Free Market. Solving Problems Rational People Don't Even Have. ™
• Speaking of the General Assembly, now Indiana's most exclusive psych ward for sufferers of religious mania, there was a big flap during the "short" session this year over a state specialty license plate going to the Indiana Youth Group, a support group for gay and lesbian teenagers. Our wise counsellors tried to yank the permission, tried to end the incontinent granting of specialty plates which had been created by, I've got it here somewhere…oh, the Indiana General Assembly, then saw those efforts fail. The short session--we used to have a biennial Legislature, just in case anyone tries to tell you that things are better nowadays--is generally not the time for Maximum Insanity, but, y'know, the End Times are upon us. So when this one failed the spokesmen for the One True Religion weren't satisfied to Wait Til Next Year, since they may've been Raptured by then; they pulled strings at the BMV, which discovered that the Indiana Youth Group had shockingly offered lower-numbered plates to donors, a clear breech of the public decorum engaged in only by Nazis, and every other organization with specialty plates.
So, now, the group's plate has been yanked, along with that of 4-H and the Greenways Foundation, a couple of other violators who got caught in the desire to make this seem fair.
The effort also exposed the criminal intents of now-former BMV spokesman Graig Lubsen, who maliciously told a reporter last week that the cancellation of the group's contract came after someone from the Indiana Senate contacted the BMV about it. Because, of course, there's no way that sort of thing goes on.
•
Don't the idiot progeny of Idiot Senator James Imhofe have an obligation to die of heat stroke now or something?
• I ♥ Charles Pierce, who, while I've been out enjoying the impending climatic doom of human civilization--on thirty-year-old bicycles--does something I wish I'd done: object to the pre-defense tone of the coverage of Robert Bales in the land of My Lai. Meanwhile, loc. cit., Scott Raab remembers the shameless railroading of John Demjanjuk in the land of Operation Paperclip.
Sins of the Fathers. I'm too young to know, really know, how much of the Red Scare was due to genuine fear. Obviously a lot was ginned-up political gamesmanship, the most successful American political con-game of the century. But I can say this: the publication of the evidence of the Son My massacres--not the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which required reading--was the high point of public honesty about the war, or anything else, probably; by the time Richard Nixon was elected a half-year later the blame had been reassigned to the dirty hippies of Chicago. Two years later, and one day after Calley's life sentence for being the American military's worst mass murderer, Nixon commuted Calley's sentence to three years in his room.
After a moment of shock when Life published the pictures,
the public exploded in outrage that we were criticizing an American soldier. A war which had been politicized for five years, a conflict which had been lied about for more than a decade, and one as redolent of racism as the Birmingham Transit Company had reached the pinnacle of facile cold-bloodedness, of the sort of thing we accused our enemies of, the sort of thing we'd fought the Nazis for.
Happy Talk News was not far behind.
•Speaking of which, it's been interesting, by which I mean "about as nauseating as usual", to watch local coverage of the Peyton Manning saga. Manning single-handedly took the franchise from 1-15 to one of the most valuable sports franchises on the globe. If you think "single-handedly" is an exaggeration, take a look at what they did last year without him.
There's a fucking Children's Hospital here named for him, Mandrake.
Then he senselessly gets older, and gets injured, requiring a slow rehab. And, meanwhile, giving the Colts the opportunity to draft Andrew Luck, the Next Payton Manning. So Jim "Lucky in Owning Shit, Unlucky in I.Q." Irsay cuts him loose.
This was partly due to the structure of Manning's deal, and largely due to the cap rules of the NFL, the folks for whom we built a billion-dollar barn which was a half-billion dollar barn before Mitch Daniels rescued the project. Manning's deal crushed the Colts' cap room, not this year but the next. Though, again, that happened because of the deal Irsay negotiated in the first place.
Anyway, the man cuts the Jesus of Football, a guy without whom Irsay is making his own hillbilly heroin and sewing his own atrocious suits, and the universal local media response is "Well, it's a business."
Fuck you. So's shooting Afghanis. I'm not saying the Colts should've kept Manning. I'm not saying Irsay was just trying to get out from under a $28 million payout he owed Manning this year. But if it's "just business" to cut a guy who meant everything to you for more than a decade, then what fucking meaning is there in anything, other than profit? The value of everything is now determined by who has the most expansive free bar in the media tent. Rick Santorum, take note.
Saturday, March 17
Just Like A Woman
Peggy Noonan, "America's Real War on Women". March 16
I WAS too young to've seen Lenny Bruce, not that he'd have been allowed in our house anyway, and when I discovered him, a half-decade after his death, probably, it was via the written word, not records. And, for sure, YouTube at that point was just a beautiful dream.
I haven't checked his discography, or his YouTube page, but I know that at the end of his career Lenny had pretty much forsaken stand-up comedy for stand-up court stenography, reading long passages of his many legal entanglements on stage, and that one of these included his (I think most famous) obscenity arrest for saying "cocksucker", which was described before the Bar as "an ten-letter euphemism for homosexual". And Lenny said it wasn't a ten-letter euphemism for homosexual, it was a ten-letter description of the woman he loved.
I don't recall ever calling someone a cocksucker in print. I think I've avoided Kochsucker on the grounds that fifty people got there first. I've been known to shout it at other motorists, invariably as blind cocksucking motherfucker.
I've certainly used fellatio--which the Republican Congressional delegation in the Respectful 90s, as Ms Noonan remembers them, informed me on a number of occasions is one of the Things that Homosexuals Do--as a metaphor for any number of political actions. It's not a homosexual slur. Some of my best friends are. When some idiot driver tailgates me on the interstate when I'm sixth in a line behind a rolling dumpster, he's not a cocksucking motherfucker because he sucks cocks and fucks his mother. He's a cocksucking motherfucker because he's a cocksucking motherfucker .
On to Ms Noonan, who, by the way, I'd never call "Peggy" in person, without her prior permission, but I would call "lying motherfucker"; such is the distinction between personal manners and artistic license. In addition to that "Respectful 90s" routine--that genteel period in American history where half of the Pegster's output concerned blowjobs--in fact, leave us quote her for the record:
in addition, I say, to this stunning, dementia-level historical blackout, Noonan blithely and un-ironically uses "Feminazi" in a piece about the public denegration of women.
And, y'know what? I don't care. I defend her right to be a hypocrite and an idiot. I defend Greta van Spacealien's right to critique Louis C.K., an artist she, by rights, should not be allowed to see. I'm certainly not going to defend Bill Maher, or even Matt Taibbi; hell, I'm not even going to defend myself. But if we're gonna talk about this, then let's discuss what's what.
And what's what, first of all, is that Rush Limbaugh is a decorated hero of the Republican party. Nobody's putting Matt Taibbi in their Hall of Fame. Ted Kennedy didn't write Maher a note that he was the "Number One Voice of Liberalism" the way your boy Ronnie did with Rush, mutatis mutandis. You may be offended by whomever, and whatever language you choose, but this tenth-generation Xerox of gotcha outrage falls flat. That doesn't negate your point. I agree. What does is the fact that your Presidential candidates run as far and as fast as they can from criticizing Limbaugh. What does is the fact that he's been free to talk this way for over twenty years, with nothing worse from Moral Republicans than approval being forced to remain tacit.
Either Limbaugh is "just an entertainer", in which case so are Maher and Taibbi, or else you're flinging shit. I mean s__t:
First, Peg, this whole "Liberals are the real racists, because affirmative action" routine would be a lot more effective if you folks would ever bother getting it right. Which you don't, because it's a little piece of in-group folklore, not a serious argument. I don't know what Bill Maher's real attitude about women is, nor Matt Taibbi's, and neither do you. I accept at face value their support for reproductive rights, or equal protection under the law, because they say so. It's entirely possible to support those ideas on principle, and still be a dick, personally. I certainly am. It's also entirely possible to publicly turn your view over to the Pope and still be a hypocritical little scold. It's you, Peg, and the Right in general, which seems to have a problem with this, which seems to insist that its own definition of intellectual purity be met to the letter by all of its opponents. It comes from having Commies under your beds for four decades. Just stop it. Your side got caught on the wrong side of these issues for decades, in exchange for some votes. That day is past, and the responsibility is yours and no one else's. It's entirely possible to be a racist and still support, wholeheartedly and unhypocritically, equal rights and the Brotherhood of Man. Haven't Republicans been insisting for sixty years now that their resistance to every piece of civil rights legislation, to the Equal Rights amendment, and to gay marriage had everything to do with principle, and nothing whatsoever to do with bigotry? Hasn't that been used on any number of occasions to defend, oh, Rush "Barack the Magic Negro" Limbaugh? Choose one story and stick with it. That there may be assholes out there with their own shows, or bylines, doesn't let Limbaugh off the hook. Nor you.
And while we're at it: if all you Moral Americans wish to return us to that Golden Age you keep moving around, how 'bout you quit lying? And forswear hypocrisy? I don't recall the Willie Horton campaign causing you to leave the White House, Peg.
Is cunt a witty rejoinder to the phenomenon that is Half-Governor Palin? No. I doubt it was intended as such. Does the fact that it sends you to the fainting couch make it worse, somehow, than our long tradition of character-assassination-as-politics? Impugning the character and motives of anyone who disagreed with her politics or dared question her clumsy PR moves was Palin's one stock in trade. Is that somehow purer because she's precluded from swearing? Was Nixon a more graceful pol because he only cursed out the Jews in private? For that matter, I don't remember you volunteering to get the soap so George Herbert Walker Panamanicus Bush could wash his wife's mouth out. And she didn't have the Internets as an excuse.
All of this was just smart politics when your side was getting away with it. It was okey-dokey to go to Philadelphia, Mississippi and wink at racism, so long as you didn't say nigger. It was okay to pursue a President for getting a hummer, so long as you pretended to be aghast. One thing the Evil Internet has done is call your bluff. You can't get away with having your proxies hurl shit at Hillary Clinton for eight years and pretend you've got nothing to do with it. You can't have Lee Atwater conduct a racist campaign and have his only worry be what the hapless Democratic party intends to do about it. Limbaugh can still aim his billion-dollar Empire at some law student, but he won't go unnoticed. Some of the people who oppose you use rough language. I'm sorry to break it to you Peg, but this didn't start with AOL. If you don't like the fact that there are a million Chuck Colsons out there now, maybe you should have given that some thought in the Sixties. Or the Eighties. You don't like how things have turned out? Own up, fess up, and promise to change. You go first.
Incidentally: the idea that no one ever said a cross word in public--including the L word--about Eleanor Roosevelt is pure b___s___.
I WAS too young to've seen Lenny Bruce, not that he'd have been allowed in our house anyway, and when I discovered him, a half-decade after his death, probably, it was via the written word, not records. And, for sure, YouTube at that point was just a beautiful dream.
I haven't checked his discography, or his YouTube page, but I know that at the end of his career Lenny had pretty much forsaken stand-up comedy for stand-up court stenography, reading long passages of his many legal entanglements on stage, and that one of these included his (I think most famous) obscenity arrest for saying "cocksucker", which was described before the Bar as "an ten-letter euphemism for homosexual". And Lenny said it wasn't a ten-letter euphemism for homosexual, it was a ten-letter description of the woman he loved.
I don't recall ever calling someone a cocksucker in print. I think I've avoided Kochsucker on the grounds that fifty people got there first. I've been known to shout it at other motorists, invariably as blind cocksucking motherfucker.
I've certainly used fellatio--which the Republican Congressional delegation in the Respectful 90s, as Ms Noonan remembers them, informed me on a number of occasions is one of the Things that Homosexuals Do--as a metaphor for any number of political actions. It's not a homosexual slur. Some of my best friends are. When some idiot driver tailgates me on the interstate when I'm sixth in a line behind a rolling dumpster, he's not a cocksucking motherfucker because he sucks cocks and fucks his mother. He's a cocksucking motherfucker because he's a cocksucking motherfucker .
On to Ms Noonan, who, by the way, I'd never call "Peggy" in person, without her prior permission, but I would call "lying motherfucker"; such is the distinction between personal manners and artistic license. In addition to that "Respectful 90s" routine--that genteel period in American history where half of the Pegster's output concerned blowjobs--in fact, leave us quote her for the record:
But you don't have to go back 60 and 70 years to see how much things have changed. Twenty years ago the discourse was higher….
The Internet is a breakthrough in human freedom. But over the past 20 years it has had a certain leveling effect. It hypes the cheap and glitzy, it reduces the worthiness of a thought to the number of clicks it gets.
in addition, I say, to this stunning, dementia-level historical blackout, Noonan blithely and un-ironically uses "Feminazi" in a piece about the public denegration of women.
And, y'know what? I don't care. I defend her right to be a hypocrite and an idiot. I defend Greta van Spacealien's right to critique Louis C.K., an artist she, by rights, should not be allowed to see. I'm certainly not going to defend Bill Maher, or even Matt Taibbi; hell, I'm not even going to defend myself. But if we're gonna talk about this, then let's discuss what's what.
And what's what, first of all, is that Rush Limbaugh is a decorated hero of the Republican party. Nobody's putting Matt Taibbi in their Hall of Fame. Ted Kennedy didn't write Maher a note that he was the "Number One Voice of Liberalism" the way your boy Ronnie did with Rush, mutatis mutandis. You may be offended by whomever, and whatever language you choose, but this tenth-generation Xerox of gotcha outrage falls flat. That doesn't negate your point. I agree. What does is the fact that your Presidential candidates run as far and as fast as they can from criticizing Limbaugh. What does is the fact that he's been free to talk this way for over twenty years, with nothing worse from Moral Republicans than approval being forced to remain tacit.
Either Limbaugh is "just an entertainer", in which case so are Maher and Taibbi, or else you're flinging shit. I mean s__t:
Some left-wing men think they can talk like this because they're on the correct side on social issues such as abortion. Their attitude: "I backed you on the abortions you want so much, I opposed a ban on partial birth. Hell, I'll let you kill kids at any point until they're 15, I'm cool. And that means I can call women in public life t - - - s, right? Because, you know, I think of them that way."
First, Peg, this whole "Liberals are the real racists, because affirmative action" routine would be a lot more effective if you folks would ever bother getting it right. Which you don't, because it's a little piece of in-group folklore, not a serious argument. I don't know what Bill Maher's real attitude about women is, nor Matt Taibbi's, and neither do you. I accept at face value their support for reproductive rights, or equal protection under the law, because they say so. It's entirely possible to support those ideas on principle, and still be a dick, personally. I certainly am. It's also entirely possible to publicly turn your view over to the Pope and still be a hypocritical little scold. It's you, Peg, and the Right in general, which seems to have a problem with this, which seems to insist that its own definition of intellectual purity be met to the letter by all of its opponents. It comes from having Commies under your beds for four decades. Just stop it. Your side got caught on the wrong side of these issues for decades, in exchange for some votes. That day is past, and the responsibility is yours and no one else's. It's entirely possible to be a racist and still support, wholeheartedly and unhypocritically, equal rights and the Brotherhood of Man. Haven't Republicans been insisting for sixty years now that their resistance to every piece of civil rights legislation, to the Equal Rights amendment, and to gay marriage had everything to do with principle, and nothing whatsoever to do with bigotry? Hasn't that been used on any number of occasions to defend, oh, Rush "Barack the Magic Negro" Limbaugh? Choose one story and stick with it. That there may be assholes out there with their own shows, or bylines, doesn't let Limbaugh off the hook. Nor you.
And while we're at it: if all you Moral Americans wish to return us to that Golden Age you keep moving around, how 'bout you quit lying? And forswear hypocrisy? I don't recall the Willie Horton campaign causing you to leave the White House, Peg.
Is cunt a witty rejoinder to the phenomenon that is Half-Governor Palin? No. I doubt it was intended as such. Does the fact that it sends you to the fainting couch make it worse, somehow, than our long tradition of character-assassination-as-politics? Impugning the character and motives of anyone who disagreed with her politics or dared question her clumsy PR moves was Palin's one stock in trade. Is that somehow purer because she's precluded from swearing? Was Nixon a more graceful pol because he only cursed out the Jews in private? For that matter, I don't remember you volunteering to get the soap so George Herbert Walker Panamanicus Bush could wash his wife's mouth out. And she didn't have the Internets as an excuse.
All of this was just smart politics when your side was getting away with it. It was okey-dokey to go to Philadelphia, Mississippi and wink at racism, so long as you didn't say nigger. It was okay to pursue a President for getting a hummer, so long as you pretended to be aghast. One thing the Evil Internet has done is call your bluff. You can't get away with having your proxies hurl shit at Hillary Clinton for eight years and pretend you've got nothing to do with it. You can't have Lee Atwater conduct a racist campaign and have his only worry be what the hapless Democratic party intends to do about it. Limbaugh can still aim his billion-dollar Empire at some law student, but he won't go unnoticed. Some of the people who oppose you use rough language. I'm sorry to break it to you Peg, but this didn't start with AOL. If you don't like the fact that there are a million Chuck Colsons out there now, maybe you should have given that some thought in the Sixties. Or the Eighties. You don't like how things have turned out? Own up, fess up, and promise to change. You go first.
Incidentally: the idea that no one ever said a cross word in public--including the L word--about Eleanor Roosevelt is pure b___s___.
Thursday, March 15
Santorum Campaign Reaches A Climax
VIA Wonkette we learn that Rick Santorum's law degree really doesn't disqualify him from criticizing people who seek higher education after all. At least not those who learn anything. From santorum.com :
Maybe you should hire yourselves a good lawyer.
Like one who could explain the First Amendment to you.
And I don't mean "Hey, man, free speech." I mean an actual understanding of the First Amendment, which would encompass precedents on Church and State, and Obscenity. Because I'll be goddamned is there's anything more basic in American jurisprudence than understanding the protections and limitations of the First.
Hundreds of tax-avoiding organizations and many decades, and whaddya got? Every so often someone at Justice--politically motivated or just permanently a sexual juvenile--will go after some Mom&Pop porn store on the grounds that it doesn't have the resources to fight. Not because of "obscenity". Because of leverage. The only way you're ever going to get a real obscenity conviction is by amending the Constitution. The only way you and your support mob is going to get leverage over the entire country is to have Jesus come down and sign up.
Really, though, please do tell us how you're going to shut down internet porn. I guess because you people believe Al Gore invented the thing you think we run it, huh?
Oh, you'll appoint a wingnut AG? There's a news flash. You have some dim awareness that Ed Meese and John Ashcroft were already there? Maybe we should start covering statues now. And Chuck Keating's still available for Blue Ribbon Commission work.
Listen, Frothy: porn addiction doesn't seem to've had as deleterious a sexual effect on our young people as Catholic doctrine has. And no matter how porn-addled, few consumers of the stuff can match your own level of kink.
For many decades, the American public has actively petitioned the United States Congress for laws prohibiting distribution of hard-core adult pornography.
Congress has responded. Current federal “obscenity” laws prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier. Rick Santorum believes that federal obscenity laws should be vigorously enforced. “If elected President, I will appoint an Attorney General who will do so.”
The Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws. While the Obama Department of Justice seems to favor pornographers over children and families, that will change under a Santorum Administration.
I proudly support the efforts of the War on Illegal Pornography Coalition that has tirelessly fought to get federal obscenity laws enforced. That coalition is composed of 120 national, state, and local groups, including Morality in Media, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Cornerstone Family Council of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania Family Institute, Concerned Women for America, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a host of other groups. Together we will prevail.
Maybe you should hire yourselves a good lawyer.
Like one who could explain the First Amendment to you.
And I don't mean "Hey, man, free speech." I mean an actual understanding of the First Amendment, which would encompass precedents on Church and State, and Obscenity. Because I'll be goddamned is there's anything more basic in American jurisprudence than understanding the protections and limitations of the First.
Hundreds of tax-avoiding organizations and many decades, and whaddya got? Every so often someone at Justice--politically motivated or just permanently a sexual juvenile--will go after some Mom&Pop porn store on the grounds that it doesn't have the resources to fight. Not because of "obscenity". Because of leverage. The only way you're ever going to get a real obscenity conviction is by amending the Constitution. The only way you and your support mob is going to get leverage over the entire country is to have Jesus come down and sign up.
Really, though, please do tell us how you're going to shut down internet porn. I guess because you people believe Al Gore invented the thing you think we run it, huh?
Oh, you'll appoint a wingnut AG? There's a news flash. You have some dim awareness that Ed Meese and John Ashcroft were already there? Maybe we should start covering statues now. And Chuck Keating's still available for Blue Ribbon Commission work.
Listen, Frothy: porn addiction doesn't seem to've had as deleterious a sexual effect on our young people as Catholic doctrine has. And no matter how porn-addled, few consumers of the stuff can match your own level of kink.
Wednesday, March 14
Group Hug
David Brooks, "The Fertility Implosion". March 12
SHORTER David Brooks: the Market is perfect, it's the people who keep fucking it up.
Look: isn't it time some Republican tried to pull the plug on Brooks, for the same reason that the Koch Brothers want to stop the Cato charade?
The GOP doesn't need the cover anymore. The Republican party needs some smarty-pants quoting "experts" like a Baptist picnic needs margarita glasses.
Sure, sure, for some reason Brooks seems to need the Republican party more than it needs him. But if that "there are no moderates in the Republican party" piece a couple weeks ago was the strangled cry of a man who just found out his girlfriend dumped him four years ago, this--pseudo-science intended to show that the Bronze Age fertility superstitions his party can no longer keep hidden are really quite sound, if you squint hard enough--is the work of a man who picked himself up, admitted that she changed her phone number, email addy, and her locks, that it's just never meant to be, and who promptly went to the florist and ordered her flowers.
SHORTER David Brooks: the Market is perfect, it's the people who keep fucking it up.
Look: isn't it time some Republican tried to pull the plug on Brooks, for the same reason that the Koch Brothers want to stop the Cato charade?
The GOP doesn't need the cover anymore. The Republican party needs some smarty-pants quoting "experts" like a Baptist picnic needs margarita glasses.
Sure, sure, for some reason Brooks seems to need the Republican party more than it needs him. But if that "there are no moderates in the Republican party" piece a couple weeks ago was the strangled cry of a man who just found out his girlfriend dumped him four years ago, this--pseudo-science intended to show that the Bronze Age fertility superstitions his party can no longer keep hidden are really quite sound, if you squint hard enough--is the work of a man who picked himself up, admitted that she changed her phone number, email addy, and her locks, that it's just never meant to be, and who promptly went to the florist and ordered her flowers.
Y'know, assuming the worst, that I was a member of a political party, and my short-range goals were that it either a) come to its senses or b) prove to be not quite the disaster it almost surely will be, I think I'd be examining other options.
It's interesting, ain't it, that the only time Republican economic "thinkers" believe Malthus is when the subject is Social Security? Our reliance on fossil fuels, global climate change, * an insane healthcare system, * our ever-increasing reliance on a vulnerable communications system that's one Chinese bottle rocket away from being space junk, even the results of galloping anti-immigrant insanity on our food crops, will all be solved automatically by the Market. Projected deficit in twenty years in the Social Security system, unless the Congress pays back the money it swiped from the till? Cosmically insurmountable. Dismantling the system is the only way to solve it.
But we'll still have the most rapidly aging billion-dollar military gizmos. And old people can't get out of the way so quickly.
For fuck's sake, was it only people who "saw population growth as a problem" who took economic growth for granted? It's not the way I remember it. Could that be just another passive-aggressive snipe at environmentalists? Hmmm? Maybe Brooks should try applying his dilettante's mind to their literature for a change.
Here's an idea; it doesn't come from an economist writing a sociology treatise, but from the plumber I had paint my house: we don't need more people. We don't even need smarter people. We need you fucks to stop filling everybody's head with bullshit designed to make yourselves wealthier no matter what.
___________
* assuming they admit it.
It's interesting, ain't it, that the only time Republican economic "thinkers" believe Malthus is when the subject is Social Security? Our reliance on fossil fuels, global climate change, * an insane healthcare system, * our ever-increasing reliance on a vulnerable communications system that's one Chinese bottle rocket away from being space junk, even the results of galloping anti-immigrant insanity on our food crops, will all be solved automatically by the Market. Projected deficit in twenty years in the Social Security system, unless the Congress pays back the money it swiped from the till? Cosmically insurmountable. Dismantling the system is the only way to solve it.
For decades, people took dynamism and economic growth for granted and saw population growth as a problem. Now we’ve gone to the other extreme, and it’s clear that young people are the scarce resource. In the 21st century, the U.S. could be the slowly aging leader of a rapidly aging world.
But we'll still have the most rapidly aging billion-dollar military gizmos. And old people can't get out of the way so quickly.
For fuck's sake, was it only people who "saw population growth as a problem" who took economic growth for granted? It's not the way I remember it. Could that be just another passive-aggressive snipe at environmentalists? Hmmm? Maybe Brooks should try applying his dilettante's mind to their literature for a change.
Here's an idea; it doesn't come from an economist writing a sociology treatise, but from the plumber I had paint my house: we don't need more people. We don't even need smarter people. We need you fucks to stop filling everybody's head with bullshit designed to make yourselves wealthier no matter what.
___________
* assuming they admit it.
Monday, March 12
When Do They Announce Pulitzers?
Ross Douthat, "Not-So-Crazy Republicans". March 10
I KNOW that Republican discombobulation is supposed to cheer me up, but, eh. Perhaps if we had a second major political party, one poised to roll back the three decades of lunacy of which "brought us" to "this point".
Some people are never satisfied.
I'd like to skip ahead--frankly, I'd like to skip the whole thing--but first let us ask a question that goes unasked far too often: Isn't three fucking years enough time for Ross Douthat to have demonstrated--however briefly--what he's doing at the Times? It's like the third year of Iraq War II: the scope of the mistake has to be obvious, even to people who originally believed in it, but there's no way the administration is going to admit to making that big a mistake.
Why does a Shorter Ross Douthat always sound like a twelve-year-old?
Shorter Ross Douthat: People say that the Republican party is insane, but it's not insane, because it was smart enough to choose the guy who only pretends to be an insane Republican.
or a petulant twelve-year-old?
Shorter Ross Douthat: The Grownups are back in charge.
I'm willing to admit that there may be a column here, but it's not 800 words on how the Republican voter has managed, heroically, to overcome the sort of candidate who appeals to the Republican voter.
How remarkably short-sighted of the Media to suggest that the person leading national preference polls among Republicans might win the nomination.
Now, correct me if I've missed something, because even for the professional layabout it's tough to keep up with Ross' frantic one-column-per-week pace (except when he was taking six weeks off to reexamine his life, or get a secret appendectomy at the Jenna Bush Clinic). But when exactly did he call the Republican Presidential Associate Clowns "bomb throwers"? Before now? Not while any of 'em was leading the polls. In fact, which GOPer George Metesky is he referring to? Were the positions of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry that much different from Douthat's own? Or notably outside the Republican mainstream, or different from what Mitt Romney will admit to? Douthat recently anointed Rick Santorum as the Brains of that outfit (as he does again here, the better to excuse those Responsible Republican voters); isn't Santorum the biggest bomb thrower of the bunch? Y'know, at least with Brooks you imagine he'd have no personal objection to gay marriage equality, or the status quo on reproductive rights, and is probably a little melancholy that they're such a sure-fire voting gimmick for his side. Douthat's only objection seems to be that, as the snake handler who's been up North and et in hotels, his unlettered brethren back in the holler are screwin' up the opportunity to install a stealth theocracy.
Y'know, Ross, if you think Jindal, Rubio, and Christie constitute an exciting benchful of major league prospects your problems are longer-term than you imagine.
Yo. Look, Ross-O, I'm sure someone somewhere told you to count your blessings.
Yeah, curse the luck. Bush, as you mention, has a poisoned last name, in some quarters because he shares it with the Worst President in the history of the Republic, in others because he didn't strangle his brother in his crib when he had the chance. Huckabee is an entertaining huckster who made the right--and Republican--decision to enrich himself above his bleeding concern for the direction of the nation. Recall that Huckabee was too liberal four years ago for having once signed a tax increase, so imagine what would have happened to him this time, driven even farther rightward and toward more of the blatant religious pandering he adopted when all else failed last time. Of My Man Mitch, well, let's just say he married the perfect woman. You guys can pretend all you want, but Daniels' record is awful, and not just at OMB; he was really vulnerable if he stepped outside the Hoosier cocoon and faced big league pitching. Not that being full of shit has stopped every candidate, but his prospects are a lot rosier for having not run.
Well, they've showed they'll swallow anything if it'll get rid of the black guy. Neither of those things being particularly surprising.
I KNOW that Republican discombobulation is supposed to cheer me up, but, eh. Perhaps if we had a second major political party, one poised to roll back the three decades of lunacy of which "brought us" to "this point".
Some people are never satisfied.
I'd like to skip ahead--frankly, I'd like to skip the whole thing--but first let us ask a question that goes unasked far too often: Isn't three fucking years enough time for Ross Douthat to have demonstrated--however briefly--what he's doing at the Times? It's like the third year of Iraq War II: the scope of the mistake has to be obvious, even to people who originally believed in it, but there's no way the administration is going to admit to making that big a mistake.
Why does a Shorter Ross Douthat always sound like a twelve-year-old?
Shorter Ross Douthat: People say that the Republican party is insane, but it's not insane, because it was smart enough to choose the guy who only pretends to be an insane Republican.
or a petulant twelve-year-old?
Shorter Ross Douthat: The Grownups are back in charge.
I'm willing to admit that there may be a column here, but it's not 800 words on how the Republican voter has managed, heroically, to overcome the sort of candidate who appeals to the Republican voter.
From early 2011 onward, the media have overinterpreted this sifting process, treating every polling surge for a not-Romney candidate almost as seriously as an actual primary result. They might nominate Herman Cain! They might nominate Michele Bachmann! Why — they might nominate Donald Trump!
How remarkably short-sighted of the Media to suggest that the person leading national preference polls among Republicans might win the nomination.
Not so much. Instead, despite an understandable desire to vote for a candidate other than Mitt Romney, Republicans have been slowly but surely delivering him the nomination — consistently, if reluctantly, choosing the safe option over the bomb-throwers and ideologues.
Now, correct me if I've missed something, because even for the professional layabout it's tough to keep up with Ross' frantic one-column-per-week pace (except when he was taking six weeks off to reexamine his life, or get a secret appendectomy at the Jenna Bush Clinic). But when exactly did he call the Republican Presidential Associate Clowns "bomb throwers"? Before now? Not while any of 'em was leading the polls. In fact, which GOPer George Metesky is he referring to? Were the positions of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry that much different from Douthat's own? Or notably outside the Republican mainstream, or different from what Mitt Romney will admit to? Douthat recently anointed Rick Santorum as the Brains of that outfit (as he does again here, the better to excuse those Responsible Republican voters); isn't Santorum the biggest bomb thrower of the bunch? Y'know, at least with Brooks you imagine he'd have no personal objection to gay marriage equality, or the status quo on reproductive rights, and is probably a little melancholy that they're such a sure-fire voting gimmick for his side. Douthat's only objection seems to be that, as the snake handler who's been up North and et in hotels, his unlettered brethren back in the holler are screwin' up the opportunity to install a stealth theocracy.
A crazy party might have chosen Cain or Bachmann as its standard-bearer. The Republican electorate dismissed them long before the first ballots were even cast.First of all, Ross, Cain removed himself, Perry removed Bachmann, and his own performance was so laughable inept that even a party which pretended George W. Bush was Churchillian couldn't ignore it. Second, it's the money people who put those clowns on the dais, and the money people who removed 'em, and when someone over your way starts complaining about them I'll take notice. Finally, while the voters never nominated nor removed any of 'em, they sure put each one atop the polls at some point, and no amount of Romney hatred explains that.
A crazy party wouldn’t have cared how Rick Perry debated so long as he promised to visit Texas justice on the Democratic Party. The Republican electorate did care, and delivered him less than one vote for every $1,000 dollars his campaign spent.
Even the elevation of Rick Santorum as the last not-Romney standing testifies to the Republican electorate’s relative sobriety. For all his follies and failings, Santorum is a more plausible presidential candidate than most of this season’s alternatives — more experienced than Cain and Bachmann,Who isn't?
more substantive and eloquent than Perry,Who isn't? Hell, what isn't?
more principled than Gingrich.Could someone call 9-1-1? I think I'm bleeding internally.
As a two-term senator from a swing state with a record of legislative accomplishments, he’s far closer to a right-wing Howard Dean than a right-wing Jesse Jackson.You mean his record of voting with his Team? By the way, whatever happened to No Executive Experience?
What we’re really seeing from the Republican campaign, over all, is less a party gone mad than a party caught between generations. The disasters of the George W. Bush era depleted the party’s bench of officeholders and tarnished the (last) name of its most successful big-state governor. The elections of 2009-10 delivered a promising crop of future stars, but the current presidential campaign arrived too soon for them to be entirely seasoned.
Y'know, Ross, if you think Jindal, Rubio, and Christie constitute an exciting benchful of major league prospects your problems are longer-term than you imagine.
If the current race pitted Jeb Bush against, say, Mike Huckabee and Mitch Daniels, nobody would be talking about how the party has gone off the rails.
Yo. Look, Ross-O, I'm sure someone somewhere told you to count your blessings.
But those three men all found reasons not to run.
Yeah, curse the luck. Bush, as you mention, has a poisoned last name, in some quarters because he shares it with the Worst President in the history of the Republic, in others because he didn't strangle his brother in his crib when he had the chance. Huckabee is an entertaining huckster who made the right--and Republican--decision to enrich himself above his bleeding concern for the direction of the nation. Recall that Huckabee was too liberal four years ago for having once signed a tax increase, so imagine what would have happened to him this time, driven even farther rightward and toward more of the blatant religious pandering he adopted when all else failed last time. Of My Man Mitch, well, let's just say he married the perfect woman. You guys can pretend all you want, but Daniels' record is awful, and not just at OMB; he was really vulnerable if he stepped outside the Hoosier cocoon and faced big league pitching. Not that being full of shit has stopped every candidate, but his prospects are a lot rosier for having not run.
So the primary electorate was left to choose from a roster of retreads, mediocrities and cable-news candidates. And given their options, Republican voters have acquitted themselves about as sensibly, responsibly and even patriotically as anyone could reasonably expect.
Well, they've showed they'll swallow anything if it'll get rid of the black guy. Neither of those things being particularly surprising.
Sunday, March 11
Talking To Yourself In Polysyllables Is Still Talking To Yourself
George Eff Will, "Those pesky things called laws". March 9
IT'S not merely my contention; it was my observation that, having lost every argument of import in the 1960s, and on factual grounds, for the most part, "conservatives" figured the only way to ever win again was to stop listening to the opposition. We now have an entire generation grown to middle-aged punditry which doesn't understand what "engaging the argument" means. (Thus the idea that we'd somehow be better off with a Senateful of Olympia Snowes and Dick Lugars, "natural" "non-partisans", as opposed to, say, finding someone smarter, or closer to the natural consensus of the country, or, god forbid, not beholden to Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs.)
George Eff Will owes his entire career to the phenomenon. He's a national pundit (and leading "conservative" intellectual) not because he had anything wise to say, or a witty way of saying it, and not because the late 1970s were crying out for a recapitulation of the debates of the Tyler administration. He's a national pundit because Dick Fucking Nixon hated the Press, and adding Will to the Post and This Week was one way to prove that not all the gentlemen of the Press were as ultra-liberal as David Broder or David Brinkley.
And, y'know, fine; pundits aren't supposed to straddle fences, but it'd be nice if they at least had to pretend to watch out for bird shit and barbed wire. The fact that the post-war "conservative" tradition was informed by galloping fantasy and willful inaccuracy, poured copiously over a bed of groundless paranoia--the reason why the so-called liberal media was so-called liberal, to the extent it was--was never addressed. Will just donned his little I'm-so-unfashionable-you're-supposed-to-imagine-I'm-serious bowtie, and got to spout his monarchist claptrap as though it had some intellectual currency. And it still is news.
And once on the stage Will was permitted to simply ignore all the other actors. Is there some other explanation for how the Republican party is the party of incontinent tax-cutting thirty years after it was demonstrated to be a failure and a fraud? For the disparity between Ronald Reagan, "conservative" mythological hero, and Ronald Reagan, actual and addled titular head of the most corrupt administration since Grant's? The punditry weeps, openly, that the 2012 campaign could be "reduced" to discussing a "settled issue" like contraception, but we've had forty years of punditry which pretended the "ethical" opposition to reproductive freedom had no connection whatsoever to institutionalized Bronze Age patriarchy. The same bastards who marched us off to twin disasters in the Middle East now demand war with Iran and are taken seriously rather than being trussed up like Mussolini's mistress.
This has done no one any good. What it's done to "conservatism" is on view at the National Review, Will's first sinecure, which started out as a plutocratic, racist, fatuous High Church organ and has managed to go downhill; what it's done to the Republican party was clearly displayed by Sarah Palin in the three years before the current Clown Car to the Nomination got in gear; what it's done to the country, well, look around. Will is supposedly one of his party's deep-thinkers who are perturbed by this "sudden" turn of events, even as his undisclosed wife worked mostly undisclosedly for the biggest buffoon save one. How long is it going to be before we admit that that is part of the problem? If you didn't realize what the Republican party was becoming over the past three decades your place on the ash heap of history is unfairly vacant.
But here's Will:
Izzat enough for you? I hope so. The utter lawlessness of the Obama administration is perfectly illustrated by its attempts to gain a waiver for funding UNESCO, and by talking to states interested in a voluntary adoption of national standards. Texas has already opted out, by the way, lest it be forced to teach History. Again, the measure of our total fucked-upedness is that Texas imagined it would be included in the first place.
Friends, when George Eff Will was born, Pearl Harbor was still seven months away. He was, in other words, an intelligent teenager when the whole of Dixie shut down its public schools rather than comply with Brown. In his 70 years the United States has engaged in more than fifty military conflicts; precisely two involved a Declaration of War, and both of those occurred before he was a year old. He undoubtedly knows, and maybe even recalls, the United States government trying to prevent American citizens from gaining employment in the movie industry, because of what they thought, or used to think. He certainly remembers the Bay of Pigs, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia. He probably picked up a word or two about the FBI's program to entice Sixties Radicals into blowing shit up, and provide the hardware. I'm sure Nixon's domestic programs, including the Plumbers, caught his attention for a week or two. What he knows about Debategate, the Iranian hostage deal, Iran-Contra and the willful violation of the Boland amendment he might not want to mention. All that's before Bush's signing statements, the Patriot Act, the retroactive immunity given international telecommunications conglomerates for illegally spying on every living American, and the shredding of the Geneva Conventions and the Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth amendments to the Constitution, in the name of the Holy War On Terra In Perpetuity.
For that matter, we might point out that the worst example of government overreach before George W. Bush became President, with the approval of George Eff Will, occurred during the John Adams administration. So much for government expansion being the root of the problem.
But, yeah, sure. Asking for a waiver of a fifteen-year-old pro-AIPAC piece of shit legislation, and talking to state officials who might want to consider actually improving education in some way? That's how Hitler got started.
IT'S not merely my contention; it was my observation that, having lost every argument of import in the 1960s, and on factual grounds, for the most part, "conservatives" figured the only way to ever win again was to stop listening to the opposition. We now have an entire generation grown to middle-aged punditry which doesn't understand what "engaging the argument" means. (Thus the idea that we'd somehow be better off with a Senateful of Olympia Snowes and Dick Lugars, "natural" "non-partisans", as opposed to, say, finding someone smarter, or closer to the natural consensus of the country, or, god forbid, not beholden to Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs.)
George Eff Will owes his entire career to the phenomenon. He's a national pundit (and leading "conservative" intellectual) not because he had anything wise to say, or a witty way of saying it, and not because the late 1970s were crying out for a recapitulation of the debates of the Tyler administration. He's a national pundit because Dick Fucking Nixon hated the Press, and adding Will to the Post and This Week was one way to prove that not all the gentlemen of the Press were as ultra-liberal as David Broder or David Brinkley.
And, y'know, fine; pundits aren't supposed to straddle fences, but it'd be nice if they at least had to pretend to watch out for bird shit and barbed wire. The fact that the post-war "conservative" tradition was informed by galloping fantasy and willful inaccuracy, poured copiously over a bed of groundless paranoia--the reason why the so-called liberal media was so-called liberal, to the extent it was--was never addressed. Will just donned his little I'm-so-unfashionable-you're-supposed-to-imagine-I'm-serious bowtie, and got to spout his monarchist claptrap as though it had some intellectual currency. And it still is news.
And once on the stage Will was permitted to simply ignore all the other actors. Is there some other explanation for how the Republican party is the party of incontinent tax-cutting thirty years after it was demonstrated to be a failure and a fraud? For the disparity between Ronald Reagan, "conservative" mythological hero, and Ronald Reagan, actual and addled titular head of the most corrupt administration since Grant's? The punditry weeps, openly, that the 2012 campaign could be "reduced" to discussing a "settled issue" like contraception, but we've had forty years of punditry which pretended the "ethical" opposition to reproductive freedom had no connection whatsoever to institutionalized Bronze Age patriarchy. The same bastards who marched us off to twin disasters in the Middle East now demand war with Iran and are taken seriously rather than being trussed up like Mussolini's mistress.
This has done no one any good. What it's done to "conservatism" is on view at the National Review, Will's first sinecure, which started out as a plutocratic, racist, fatuous High Church organ and has managed to go downhill; what it's done to the Republican party was clearly displayed by Sarah Palin in the three years before the current Clown Car to the Nomination got in gear; what it's done to the country, well, look around. Will is supposedly one of his party's deep-thinkers who are perturbed by this "sudden" turn of events, even as his undisclosed wife worked mostly undisclosedly for the biggest buffoon save one. How long is it going to be before we admit that that is part of the problem? If you didn't realize what the Republican party was becoming over the past three decades your place on the ash heap of history is unfairly vacant.
But here's Will:
Two policies of the Obama administration illustrate an axiom: As government expands, its lawfulness contracts. Consider the administration’s desire to continue funding UNESCO and to develop a national curriculum for primary and secondary education.
Izzat enough for you? I hope so. The utter lawlessness of the Obama administration is perfectly illustrated by its attempts to gain a waiver for funding UNESCO, and by talking to states interested in a voluntary adoption of national standards. Texas has already opted out, by the way, lest it be forced to teach History. Again, the measure of our total fucked-upedness is that Texas imagined it would be included in the first place.
Friends, when George Eff Will was born, Pearl Harbor was still seven months away. He was, in other words, an intelligent teenager when the whole of Dixie shut down its public schools rather than comply with Brown. In his 70 years the United States has engaged in more than fifty military conflicts; precisely two involved a Declaration of War, and both of those occurred before he was a year old. He undoubtedly knows, and maybe even recalls, the United States government trying to prevent American citizens from gaining employment in the movie industry, because of what they thought, or used to think. He certainly remembers the Bay of Pigs, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia. He probably picked up a word or two about the FBI's program to entice Sixties Radicals into blowing shit up, and provide the hardware. I'm sure Nixon's domestic programs, including the Plumbers, caught his attention for a week or two. What he knows about Debategate, the Iranian hostage deal, Iran-Contra and the willful violation of the Boland amendment he might not want to mention. All that's before Bush's signing statements, the Patriot Act, the retroactive immunity given international telecommunications conglomerates for illegally spying on every living American, and the shredding of the Geneva Conventions and the Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth amendments to the Constitution, in the name of the Holy War On Terra In Perpetuity.
For that matter, we might point out that the worst example of government overreach before George W. Bush became President, with the approval of George Eff Will, occurred during the John Adams administration. So much for government expansion being the root of the problem.
But, yeah, sure. Asking for a waiver of a fifteen-year-old pro-AIPAC piece of shit legislation, and talking to state officials who might want to consider actually improving education in some way? That's how Hitler got started.
Saturday, March 10
Friday, March 9
Let's Not Be Hasty. Lieberman Is Still Available.
David Weigel, "Romney-Santorum 2012, Obviously". March 8
FIRST, I would like to apologize if anyone was offended by the fact that I've taken David Weigel to be a journalist all these years. I'm an old man, and ironic hipster comedy is sometimes lost on me. Especially unintentional hipster comedy.
So…I guess it's time for the typing class to display its terminal boredom with the Republican race, look around, find no real issues worth covering, check the calendar, and bring on the Veep speculation.
Weigel enlarges on ("Small is the New Large") this Tim Noah piece, which suggested that Romney is so boring, and the Republican party so dysfunctional, that a Veepstakes piece might actually liven things up. Weigel the Journalist might have been expected to miss the point, or pretend to miss it; Weigel the comedian goes for the killer riff:
Yeah, well, Republican voters have been vetting Santorum, too, and even with the demise of every other religious fanatic candidate he can't beat the hated Romney. People may not vote for Vice-Presidents, but if you guys didn't learn last time that pandering to the 30% is a desperate and boneheaded move, go on and find out again.
FIRST, I would like to apologize if anyone was offended by the fact that I've taken David Weigel to be a journalist all these years. I'm an old man, and ironic hipster comedy is sometimes lost on me. Especially unintentional hipster comedy.
So…I guess it's time for the typing class to display its terminal boredom with the Republican race, look around, find no real issues worth covering, check the calendar, and bring on the Veep speculation.
Weigel enlarges on ("Small is the New Large") this Tim Noah piece, which suggested that Romney is so boring, and the Republican party so dysfunctional, that a Veepstakes piece might actually liven things up. Weigel the Journalist might have been expected to miss the point, or pretend to miss it; Weigel the comedian goes for the killer riff:
1) Would Santorum alienate swing voters? We'd see about that. There's the specter of Sarah Palin hovering over any VP choice. But Palin's main problem was that she undercut John McCain's "experience" argument by having eighteen months of statewide elected office behind here, and by responding to pressure with aggressive ignorance. The media is already vetting Santorum, for the most part.
Yeah, well, Republican voters have been vetting Santorum, too, and even with the demise of every other religious fanatic candidate he can't beat the hated Romney. People may not vote for Vice-Presidents, but if you guys didn't learn last time that pandering to the 30% is a desperate and boneheaded move, go on and find out again.
True, it's hard to argue with "we'd see"; it's also hard to remain firmly seated as this inexplicably becomes a discussion of Sarah Palin. "The specter of Sarah Palin" haunts Romney's choice of Veep? Hell, Sarah Palin haunts the whole goddam party, not that she didn't simply take over as Poltergeist in Chief, and seamlessly, from the shade of George W. Bush. Palin's the only reason an avalanche victim like Santorum, with no legislative record beyond his crippling Ovary fetish, was even in the race in the first place. The whole Republican primary has been one big "Find the Sarah Palin Replacement" reality show.
On the other hand, if we'd like to discuss Santorum's negatives, the better to "dispense" with them, they are clear, legion, and the sort of thing Republican "moderates" don't like to discuss with non-family members. Santorum would add a lot to the ticket, provided you think you can repeal the 19th amendment in the next seven months.
Whatever people said about Palin in '08--this includes Republicans, but only when they didn't realize the mic was live--it revolved around her obvious unpreparedness and the McCain campaign's astonishing gaffe. She was, at that time, a fluke and a punchline. This time voters--non-Republican voters--are going to look at a Santorum candidacy as a first-fitting for the mantle of the Republican party. I guess we'd see.
Say it again: until you guys are honest about this shit--beginning with yourselves--you've got no hope of governing, if you even care about that. You might win elections the way somebody wins a coin toss, but while Free Cash from Billionaire Lunatics may continue to appeal, as an electoral strategy it pretty much reached its full potential with that daisful of Palin impersonators you needed Mitt Romney to (barely) defeat. The question isn't Who Will Mitt Choose? The question is What Choice Does He Have?
On the other hand, if we'd like to discuss Santorum's negatives, the better to "dispense" with them, they are clear, legion, and the sort of thing Republican "moderates" don't like to discuss with non-family members. Santorum would add a lot to the ticket, provided you think you can repeal the 19th amendment in the next seven months.
Whatever people said about Palin in '08--this includes Republicans, but only when they didn't realize the mic was live--it revolved around her obvious unpreparedness and the McCain campaign's astonishing gaffe. She was, at that time, a fluke and a punchline. This time voters--non-Republican voters--are going to look at a Santorum candidacy as a first-fitting for the mantle of the Republican party. I guess we'd see.
Say it again: until you guys are honest about this shit--beginning with yourselves--you've got no hope of governing, if you even care about that. You might win elections the way somebody wins a coin toss, but while Free Cash from Billionaire Lunatics may continue to appeal, as an electoral strategy it pretty much reached its full potential with that daisful of Palin impersonators you needed Mitt Romney to (barely) defeat. The question isn't Who Will Mitt Choose? The question is What Choice Does He Have?
Wednesday, March 7
The Eternal Palimpsest Of The "Conservative" Bullshit Campaign
William McGurn, "Reagan Was A Sure Loser Too: Conventional wisdom about Republican presidential prospects sounds mighty familiar." March 5
"MIGHTY familiar", that is, provided you too had spent every night for the last thirty-two years fantasizing about The Ol' Gipper.
Anything said about the ostensible point here--"C'mon gang! It's an election year! Anything can happen! The experts have counted us out before!"--is probably too much. The point could be made about all but three Presidential elections since WWII, and the reader is reminded that the exceptions gave us the full term of Lyndon Johnson, and the second terms of Richard Nixon and "Dutch" Reagan.
And we'll grant a free pass for the use of James "Scotty" Reston, though by 1980 he was more generally regarded not as the Dean of Conventional Wisdom but as Henry Kissinger's butt-boy. Leave us stipulate that what Reston said--particularly about a Reagan victory in New Hampshire being a instance of Good Luck for Jimmy Carter--was pretty much the conventional wisdom of a certain sort of Republican observer at the time. Perhaps McGurn will stipulate in return that Reston was writing insider malarky designed to get people to read newspapers, not a first draft of history. Had he been pressed I bet that Scotty himself would have acknowledged that the future is a better judge of the past than the present is predictor of the future. Though not by as wide a margin as you might imagine.
Instead let's ask ourselves why the conventional wisdom held Reagan to be a liability, and how he overcame that. And the answers are a) because he was a loony wingnut and intellectual lightweight who'd spent eight years as Governor of California through a combination of name recognition and Sixties backlash; and b) because Carter coupled the Iranian hostage crisis occurring on his watch with the worst possible campaign imaginable.
Okay, sure, if you wanna crab about it, there's the stolen debate briefing book, and Ted Kennedy, plus whatever Bill Casey and the Ayatollah were cooking up. But Carter lost the 1980 election, by not convincing people to give him another chance.
A good argument for nominating Newt Gingrich.
Look, every adult with a nominally functioning cerebral cortex knows that poll numbers at this point are something like meaningless. Probably so do many Republican voters as well. The movement of those numbers is slightly more revealing, and they haven't been moving your way of late, McGurn. Things can and will change; the inexplicable convention bump will occur; the inexplicable "independent" voter will take until the last minute to make a choice as simple as Coffee or Tea? and will be celebrated for his keen analysis of the issues. Or "issues".
On the other hand, the numbers which are tougher to move are the negative opinion numbers, and there the Republican field looks a combination of Crabgrass and Colonoscopy. I don't know what Reagan's were in January of 1980, but I doubt half the Republican party thought he was some sort of turncoat. I do remember watching in amazement as he overcame questions about his qualifications for office by purchasing a microphone, refusing to dye his hair, and by being the sort of guy Americans would like to see play someone their idealized counterpart would have a beer with in a movie. That's not happening with Gingrich or Santorum. Mitt might be wealthy enough to afford the necessary personality transplant before the general election, but considering what they're starting with poor Ann might have to make do with three full-time body servants after dark.
We'll stipulate that Reagan might have a hard time getting nominated by the Reagan party these days. Who considered this baggage--besides George Herbert Walker Impericus Bush, whose "voodoo economics" line got his usual zero traction--I don't recall. Reagan was never anything but a vapor candidate and a genial dispenser of bumper-sticker idiocies. He's the beginning of the modern taste for rewriting unpleasant realities. With a PR department, or Xanax.
Yeah, that Reagan was just a dream at that point.
Um, aren't we about five years late in urging that on Mitt Romney?
"MIGHTY familiar", that is, provided you too had spent every night for the last thirty-two years fantasizing about The Ol' Gipper.
Anything said about the ostensible point here--"C'mon gang! It's an election year! Anything can happen! The experts have counted us out before!"--is probably too much. The point could be made about all but three Presidential elections since WWII, and the reader is reminded that the exceptions gave us the full term of Lyndon Johnson, and the second terms of Richard Nixon and "Dutch" Reagan.
And we'll grant a free pass for the use of James "Scotty" Reston, though by 1980 he was more generally regarded not as the Dean of Conventional Wisdom but as Henry Kissinger's butt-boy. Leave us stipulate that what Reston said--particularly about a Reagan victory in New Hampshire being a instance of Good Luck for Jimmy Carter--was pretty much the conventional wisdom of a certain sort of Republican observer at the time. Perhaps McGurn will stipulate in return that Reston was writing insider malarky designed to get people to read newspapers, not a first draft of history. Had he been pressed I bet that Scotty himself would have acknowledged that the future is a better judge of the past than the present is predictor of the future. Though not by as wide a margin as you might imagine.
Instead let's ask ourselves why the conventional wisdom held Reagan to be a liability, and how he overcame that. And the answers are a) because he was a loony wingnut and intellectual lightweight who'd spent eight years as Governor of California through a combination of name recognition and Sixties backlash; and b) because Carter coupled the Iranian hostage crisis occurring on his watch with the worst possible campaign imaginable.
Okay, sure, if you wanna crab about it, there's the stolen debate briefing book, and Ted Kennedy, plus whatever Bill Casey and the Ayatollah were cooking up. But Carter lost the 1980 election, by not convincing people to give him another chance.
A Harris Poll released just about this time in 1980 bolstered the case for Mr. Ford by reporting that, in a head-to-head matchup, Ford (the noncandidate) would trounce President Carter 55% to 44%. The same poll showed Reagan (the front-runner) trailing Carter 58% to 40%.
A good argument for nominating Newt Gingrich.
Look, every adult with a nominally functioning cerebral cortex knows that poll numbers at this point are something like meaningless. Probably so do many Republican voters as well. The movement of those numbers is slightly more revealing, and they haven't been moving your way of late, McGurn. Things can and will change; the inexplicable convention bump will occur; the inexplicable "independent" voter will take until the last minute to make a choice as simple as Coffee or Tea? and will be celebrated for his keen analysis of the issues. Or "issues".
On the other hand, the numbers which are tougher to move are the negative opinion numbers, and there the Republican field looks a combination of Crabgrass and Colonoscopy. I don't know what Reagan's were in January of 1980, but I doubt half the Republican party thought he was some sort of turncoat. I do remember watching in amazement as he overcame questions about his qualifications for office by purchasing a microphone, refusing to dye his hair, and by being the sort of guy Americans would like to see play someone their idealized counterpart would have a beer with in a movie. That's not happening with Gingrich or Santorum. Mitt might be wealthy enough to afford the necessary personality transplant before the general election, but considering what they're starting with poor Ann might have to make do with three full-time body servants after dark.
Nor was candidate Reagan without baggage. As governor, Reagan had pushed through the largest tax hike in California's history, had signed one of the nation's most liberal abortion laws, and—as George H.W. Bush pointed out—presided over the doubling of the state budget over his eight-year tenure, to $10.2 billion when he left office from $4.6 billion when he entered.
We'll stipulate that Reagan might have a hard time getting nominated by the Reagan party these days. Who considered this baggage--besides George Herbert Walker Impericus Bush, whose "voodoo economics" line got his usual zero traction--I don't recall. Reagan was never anything but a vapor candidate and a genial dispenser of bumper-sticker idiocies. He's the beginning of the modern taste for rewriting unpleasant realities. With a PR department, or Xanax.
Yes, the parallels to 1980 take you only so far, and Mitt Romney is no Ronald Reagan. Still, at this same point in his campaign for the GOP nomination, neither was Reagan. The President Reagan we rightly admire for bringing down the Berlin Wall, reviving the U.S. economy, and attracting into the GOP millions of disaffected Democrats was still to come.
Yeah, that Reagan was just a dream at that point.
And he got there by transcending the conventional wisdom rather than allowing himself or his message to be limited by it.
Um, aren't we about five years late in urging that on Mitt Romney?
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