And That Leaves Zero

Dan Balz, "With Rick Santorum out, Mitt Romney shifts focus to Obama". April 10

Sandhya Somashekhar, "Santorum followed a clever, emotional strategy to political resurrection". April 10

SHEESH, how do some people get out of bed in the morning?

Virtually no other candidate began the campaign from a lower perch. Santorum was a social conservative in a race expected to center on the economy. He was famous for his hard-edged brand of conservatism, especially his remarks on homosexuality, and for losing his Senate seat by an embarrassing 18 points in 2006. He was so discounted that he struggled to get the attention of debate moderators.

Yet Santorum outlasted most of his competition, winning the Iowa caucuses and contests in 10 other states — a historic feat for an upstart badly outgunned by the front-runner, Mitt Romney, who raised $74 million, more than four times Santorum’s $15.6 million. Ralph Reed, founder of the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition, called the achievement “remarkable.”

Okay, so let's be generous (and mindful of the role "facts" play in the deliberation process) and assume that Ralph "How Many Synonyms For 'Fraud' Are There?" Reed is there atop the Post's Golden Rolodex because he bribed someone. Because Jesus everything else with those two paragraphs is awful enough.

I suppose there is out there, theoretically, the WaPo reader who is intently interested in the 2012 Republican Presidential race but has, say, spent the last twelve months in a medically-induced (rather than a 2012 Republican Presidential race-induced) coma, or was just miraculously delivered from a year-long spelunking ordeal. For the rest of us, the Republican primaries just finally, mercifully, sputtered to a halt twelve hours ago. Re-explaining the candidacy of Rick Santorum is not exactly a work of incisive scholarship. It's reminding us what we had for dinner last night, when we've been living on a steady diet of freezer-burned fish sticks since the housing market crashed.

The Miracle of The Santorum, so-called, consists of outlasting Rick Perry (!), Michele Bachman (!!), Herman Cain (!!), and, briefly, Newt Fucking Gingrich, to be the guy who actually handed the nomination to Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum is 2012's Miss Uncongeniality.

The only Miracle that man accomplished was getting anyone to vote for him, ever, under any circumstances, even as the only man in the race who wasn't Mitt Romney. This, of course, is a joke, since we're talking about the Republican primary voter, who has shown, over the years, a remarkable inventiveness in finding acceptable substitutes for the traditional, but now-frowned-upon (in some circles), cross-burning. If you wanted a real miracle out of Santorum it would have consisted in winning something, anything, that didn't have "evangelical" as a prefix.

Maybe it's our model of the Republican electorate as "rational", and our wholesale purchase of the idea that the 2012 campaign "would be about economic issues" rather than, say, about Get the Black Guy, which is at fault. There are two signature events of the 2012 Republican Presidential race, and neither occurred in 2012, and neither, certainly, was a miracle: the fantastical notion of a Teabagger Revolution "which rejected the culture wars", or relocated them to the back burner, à la Chef Daniels; and the widespread proclamation that Representative Bachmann had been cured of The Crazy, as attested by her stunning performance in Republican Debate No. 1. The only people taken in by these swindles have Press passes.

Now, right on time--you can set your watch by this stuff, the way you could by Kant leaving his house--the difference being that Kant seems to've left his crazy at home when he went to work, and stayed quiet until he had something to say--here's Your Gentlemen of the Press with Romney's New Trajectory:

The general-election contest already was taking shape, with the Obama and Romney campaigns engaging each other more directly in the past few weeks. That will accelerate rapidly, with Americans now looking at a probable seven-month campaign between two candidates who have strikingly different visions about where to take the country.

Strikingly different? Really? That's an insult to anyone who's ever been struck.

The former governor was forced to the right during the bruising primary fight, leaving him weakened for the general-election campaign among some key demographic groups. He is running far behind Obama among female voters, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. He also faces potentially major problems among Hispanics because of his positions on immigration and the harsh language he used to describe them during the GOP debates.

A Nation Asks: However Will Mitt Romney Manage To Change His Stated Positions?

Romney will now devote most of his energy to drawing contrasts with Obama, free of some of the dissonance generated during the intraparty warfare of the primary race. As he does that, his advisers say, voters will begin to see him in a fresh light and gain a clearer understanding of the choice they have in the general election.

"Causing those who do not choose suicide to just stay home, low turn-out being traditionally good for the GOP."

Although most of his attention will be on the president, Romney cannot entirely ignore his right flank. Republicans vow that they will arrive at their national convention in Tampa in August as a united party, and they are probably correct, given the antipathy toward the president among the most conservative.

Must we, really, must we continue to treat the Republican party as connected to reality, however tenuous? Republicans' antipathy to the President didn't begin this week. More like "in response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964". What passed for a Republican "Presidential" campaign season was a sorry-assed proxy fight between the Crackpot wing and the Pirate wing. Note that almost all of the Pirates' heartthrobs--Mitch "The Spork" Daniels, Haley "The Largess" Barbour, and that collection of crackpipe-dream candidates that includes Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio, which makes you realize that Fiscal Republicans grasp the culture the way most white people grasp the rudiments of rhythmic movement--passed. Sagely, if I may be so bold. Note that the Crackpots didn't even really like any of their own Crackpots. Note that the collective nouns fall somewhat short--the Crackpots are all for Piracy conducted by Fiscal Republicans, objecting merely to the inclusion of minorities in the customer base, and the Pirates are Fucking Cracked, just by Ayn Rand, not the Civil War.

What justification is there for saying such people are determined to be united, when they are just now wrapping a campaign based on nothing at all except theological knife-fighting? Sure, sure, they hate the President. They hate reproductive rights, too, but they don't really do anything about it (apart from judicial appointments). Maybe in the next five or ten election cycles they'll figure out they need to articulate those positions in a way that might convince anyone who isn't already brimming over with rage. Though if the example of Roe is any indication I wouldn't put money on it.

Romney now has a chance to "articulate" that vision to anyone who hasn't paid attention so far (and by "so far" I mean "since hostilities ended in the Pacific"). Of course the catch is that he has to do so without angering a base which was upset by the fact that Rick Perry wanted to give medical attention to Mexicans found bleeding in the streets. What do the experts think of his chances?

“Romney has to build bridges to evangelical voters, who he will need to turn out in large numbers in November,” said Ralph Reed, who leads the Faith and Freedom Coalition. Reed added: “I think Romney understands this and will take whatever steps are necessary to energize social conservative voters. Evangelicals will turn out to vote against Obama. Now it’s important that they are enthusiastic about voting for the Republican nominee.”

Hey, look, everybody! Ralph Reed's out of prison!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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?

Just An Idea: Maybe Your Moderates Could Try Being Moderate

Chris Cillizza, "In GOP circles, some wonder whether the party needs to lose big to eventually win". March 4

THE 2012 Republican Presidential primaries will be remembered, if at all, for having taught us any number of things we already knew.

Rush Limbaugh is a human cloud of flatulence. Rick Santorum is a 10th century religious lunatic. Newt Gingrich is to serious politics what Newt Gingrich is to academic history.

Nobody likes Mitt Romney.

Of course the preeminent truth is that the whole goddam party is insane, and that the Press, having ignored the over-abundance of evidence of this for a generation, now finds itself incapable of dealing with this. Aside from the customary writing of scripts designed to encompass all such facts as aren't truly inconvenient. Those, as always, get ignored.

So this is the campaign which began with the artificial groundswell of popular wrath known as Teabagging. To my knowledge no one ever asked what exactly the "grassroots" were so worked up about, other than the fact they'd roundly and deservedly lost an election. That turd floated so long as it was the only Republican hope for the mid-terms, but the fact that it might mean Sarah Palin was the nominee alerted a few worrywarts who'd actively campaigned for her to become Vice President of the United States just months before.

Which led to the desperate casting of Indiana Governor Mitch "Ronald Reagan Without The Charm, Or The Stature" Daniels as the Big Brained Savior of the Big Brained Republican Economics Club. Which lasted right up until the time Mitch (Or Haley Barbour--there's an opportunity lost--or Chris Christie, or Paul Ryan) would have had to become serious candidates. Recall that, at the time, each man's refusal was excused as personal decisions which disappointed a lot of potential supporters, and not a harbinger of Sarah Palins II, III, IV, V, and VI.

Trump. Bachmann. ("Tested by Fire".) Perry. Cain. Santorum. We'll leave out Newt's minute at the Top, even though he has the coveted Palin If It Can't Be Me Sorta-Endorsement; Newt is sui generis. The rest are just as cracked, and all but Santorum as illiterately ill-prepared, as La Palin herself. Anybody really believe that the emergence of Candidate Daniels would have changed that dynamic?

When was it, actually, that it began to dawn on the bright thinkers that there was trouble a'brewin'? Not when Bachmann was taken seriously. Not when Rick Perry rode into town. And both were well-known as imbeciles long before they demonstrated that anew, in debate form.

In “Batman Begins” — the 2005 movie about the origins of the caped crusader — there is a group of villains who believe the city of Gotham is beyond saving and that the only way to fix it is to first destroy it.

Y'know, nobody ever asks whether "having a pundit class whose frame of reference exceeded pop culture" could do anything for us.

As the Republican presidential race has worn on (and on), there are some within the party wondering — privately, of course — whether the only way for the party to face the growing divide between its moderate and conservative wings is for the 2012 election to be its Gotham moment.

What "moderate" wing? If Mitt Romney had embraced his record he'd'a been run out of town in '08. Romney isn't the "moderate" candidate. He's the establishment candidate.

“I’d personally enjoy all the ‘we can’t nominate another Republican In Name Only’ crowd getting a stomping by an incumbent with an 8.5 unemployment rate,” said one senior party strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly, warning of nominating a strictly conservative candidate like former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum.

Granting, arguendo, the existence of "moderate" Republicans, on the grounds that there are still some left who are just sane enough to realize Rick Santorum is unelectable--even if they won't say so out loud--th' fuck is a "stomping" supposed to accomplish? Why should it do more than the stomping of "Moderate John" McCain? "Moderate" Republicans haven't nominated a winning candidate since Eisenhower. The lips of the modern "moderate" Republican are still firmly attached to the tailpipe of Ronald Wilson Reagan, the World's Most Unpardonably Successful Anti-fluoridationist. Why should anyone in that blasted landscape listen to them?

The GOP’s problem, according to party insiders, is most evident when it comes to the issue of immigration. All of the major Republican presidential candidates — with the exception of former House speaker Newt Gingrich — have largely rejected the idea of a path to citizenship for the 11 million people in the United States illegally.

That view has contributed to a broader sense among Hispanic voters that the Republican Party is not a friendly place for them. In the 2008 election, President Obama won the Hispanic vote nationwide with 67 percent of the vote. Given that more than half of the total growth in U.S. population over the past decade came in the Hispanic community, Republicans simply can’t afford to keep losing this largest minority group 65 percent to 35 percent and have a fighting chance of winning national elections in four or eight years’ time.

For those of you just tuning in, or exiting a coma, yes, this is the very same Republican party which threw out African-Americans--literally, not just figuratively--by dissolving all the Reconstruction-era Republican organizations across the south in 1964, and which has been milkin' that same bull ever since. It's the same one which is currently involved in a national effort to obstruct voting by poor people. It's the one where the "moderates"--see McCain, "Desperate John"--are the ones who've flip-flopped on the issue. Now a fast-growing Hispanic minority is an opportunity you're not taking full advantage of? Maybe you people should come out in favor of contraception. In selected drinking water supplies.

The question many Republican strategists are asking themselves at the moment is whether — in 2012, 2016 or even 2020 — it’s worth taking one step back in order to, hopefully, take two steps forward.

GOP 2020: That Shit-Stain Was There When We Got Here.

Two steps forward to what? You've had thirty years at least to do something about this. Your brand, clearly, consists of pushing hot buttons for votes, not offering a vision of leadership. You're not one lesson, or two, away from righting the ship. You're forty years off course.

Charm School

The Great and Small White Hope.

Dan Balz, "Governors see risks from tone, length of GOP nomination fight". February 26

Philip Rucker, "Mitt Romney at Daytona 500: 'I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners' ". February 26

Nia-Malika Henderson, "Santorum presses culture wars attack". February 26

SOMEONE at Wonkette, and I apologize for not writing it down immediately, asked recently if anyone else had been struck by the notion that Rick Santorum, faced with the prospect of actually being at the top of national Republican polls, had decided to do his damnedest to lose the thing.

Seems as good an explanation as any.

To me the twin mysteries of the 2012 Republican sweepstakes are these: 1) when did Republicans become so anti-Republican? and 2) why do people keep going to Mitch Daniels for quotes?

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said the president remains highly vulnerable because of the economy, despite some recent improvements. Once the GOP contest is over, he said, the Republican nominee will have plenty of opportunities to make his case.

“I think a lot of the miniature issues and squabbles and supposed stumbles of today will be long forgotten,” he said.

This, take it from me, is what you always get from Daniels in public: a brimming bowlful of mush, thoughtfully predigested for you.

I know, they're all trying to say "Barack Obama" as many times as they can now, because their own choices suck. Just like in 2008, 2004, and 2000. But when did "We're not Barack Obama!" become the Republican brand? (I know, "We're not Black" has been for ages, but that's another story.)

Why do they hate their candidates? Mitt Romney has demonstrated over and over again that he's the pure essence of Reaganism: self-satisfied, wealthy bubble boy, devoid of fellow feeling, and willing to say anything the Yahoos wanna hear in order to grab the reins of power. Sure, sure, "I may not rank among the most ardent of NASCAR aficionados" might seem a trifle stiff, but what possible objection is there to "some of my best friends own racing teams"? Unless friends is too much of a stretch.

Santorum? He's the most risibly "honest" candidate since Goldwater. Sure, we've got to put "honest" in quotes, because, like any public religious loudmouth he's a liar and a sexual psychopath, but still, didn't the Republican party worship the fact that George W. Bush "never read the polls [sic]"? Santorum has zeroed in on the real core of the Republican party, and told everyone else to go to Hell, literally. What's the problem? Sure, it exposes that whole "Teabaggers are fiscal conservatives, and not interested in the old-fashioned Culture War thing" routine, but who besides Dave Weigel believed that?

Daniels and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, often cited as possible late entrants, said Sunday that they have no interest in the role.

Christie, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” twice said he does not want to enter the contest. “I’m with Governor Romney,” he said. “And one of the things people know about me is that when I make up my mind, it pretty much stays made.”
Daniels reiterated his long-standing position that he will not run. “I haven’t played any games with anybody,” he said in an interview. “Nothing has changed.”
Still, he acknowledged that the nomination battle has kept the possibility of a late entrant alive.

“The fact that no one has sewn it up like previous cycles means it’s a relevant question,” said Daniels, who is neutral about the race. “It wouldn’t have been a relevant question in previous cycles. This one’s different in so many ways.”

Yeah. Because your party's had it in so many ways. Just not in any ways which causes any of you shills, mouthpieces, and privateers to admit that something's seriously wrong. And not in ways that prevent you from having a 50% chance of getting power, and a 100% chance that whoever does get power will help you stay in the game. By god, I hate to admit it, but it was the people suckered by your "grassroots" Teabagger routine who came closer to changing our politics than anyone since the '68 Democratic convention. Found a shallow grave, didn't they?

Cast that Giant Brain around for a minute, Mitchkin. Climb down from the Ego Train (wait till the Redcap shows up with the kiddie steps) and look. They're talking about you and Chris Christie as the party's saviors. And you presume to lecture the rest of us with apocalyptic nightmares?

Ice Cream, Mandrake?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

They Saved Kathryn Kuhlman's Brain

Ross Douthat "Can Santorum Win in November?" February 21

SHORTER Ross Douthat: Rick Santorum is the perfect Republican Presidential candidate, if only he weren't Rick Santorum.

Y'know, the only reason I can figure why Ross Douthat is writing about the 2012 campaign for the Times--let alone in a column labeled "Strong Opinions"--is that somebody on the Op-Ed board noticed they still had some nails lying around after they used Maureen Dowd to make sure American Letters wasn't getting out of its coffin.

"Rick Santorum is a humorless, joyless, scold, a petty, small-town, small-time bigot few people will vote for and no one likes". This is supposed to be deep analysis? (Well, no. What it is is a continuation of Douthat's entire, and already (at 30) superannuated career: "Here's what open-minded intellectual investigation would look like if the world were made up of nothing but snake-handlers and glossolaliaics.")

How much longer does he get away with this charade? Here's Douthat on the Republican "Dream" candidate"

He would hail from the Midwest – a region filled with recession-battered swing states where the president’s support is weaker than in the country as a whole. He would be a Catholic rather than an Evangelical or a Mormon, because the Catholic vote swings back and forth between the two parties in ways that other religious demographics don’t. He would have a strong personal and biographical connection to blue-collar whites, a bloc of voters whose support President Obama has always had difficulty winning. His record would be conservative enough to excite the Republican Party’s base, but leavened with enough moderation and even populism on economic issues to reassure anxious middle-income voters that the Republican Party doesn’t just exist to serve Wall Street and the rich.

In other words he'd be…Ross Douthat, if we could make New Haven part of the Middle West by fiat, just like we did Pennsylvania, and make "pretends he understands 'Reagan Democrats'" qualify as a connection to blue-collar whites, same as "pretends he grew up digging coal".

But no presidential candidate can succeed without a modicum of favorable media coverage, and so a successful populist needs to be able to disarm elite journalists (as Huckabee so expertly did, schmoozing on The Daily Show and elsewhere) as often as he alienates them. And nobody has ever used the word “disarming” to describe Rick Santorum’s approach to politics.

Okay, so explain to me how Huckabee ran third, and how after establishing himself by winning that ridiculous church-basement raffle-off in Iowa the only thing he managed to do was split Dixie with John McCain. Huckabee's Protestant fascism, which was on display later in the campaign, when he tried it as a longshot, is yet more acceptable to Middle America than Santorum's Catholic fascism, because it's less fanatical. It's got very little to do with Santorum being so unlikeable, though he certainly is that. You guys have papered over the difference for so long in your anti-abortion efforts that you've come to believe they don't exist. This is a profound misreading. You can get Baptists to sign up for your Temperance march. You're not going to get many to help when it's time to close the last liquor store in the county.

Santorum was one of four religious nutjobs in the race. He's the only one who managed to wait until primary season to blow his own foot off, mostly because no one took him seriously until the others dropped out. Why are the others gone? Why didn't Huckabee win? Religion-on-your-sleeve, social "conservatism" is supposed to be the lifeblood of Heartland. Why don't these guys win?

That’s because the former senator has the instincts of an activist, rather than of a president or statesman. Whether the topic is social issues or foreign policy, his zeal exceeds his prudence, and as a result his career is littered with debating society provocations (referencing “man-on-dog” sex in an argument about gay marriage, using his doomed 2006 Senate bid to educate Pennsylvanians on the evils of Hugo Chavez, etc.) that have won him far more enemies than friends. His passion for ideas and argument often does him credit, but in a national campaign it would probably do him in.

Yeah. The key to winning is to find a Republican who doesn't sound like one, but appeals to the base, who never makes crackpot statements, but believes Jebus counts every sperm, and who convinces working people in this country that he's one of them, except with a $12 million war chest. I don't know why you guys have so much trouble finding one, Ross. What I do know is it's not for lack of error.

Florida: Not America's Only Talking Doodle

Ross Douthat, "Gingrich 2012? Going, Going, Gone". February 1

OKAY, Mitt Romney may be inevitable--I don't particularly care; Republicans do lots of stupid shit, too much to worry about it unless it threatens to become law--but can we drop the pretense that Florida voters, or Republican voters generally, are making what in normal humans is known as a "decision"?

Florida voters, if pollsters are even remotely connected to the Earth's gravity, chose Romney, switched to Gingrich, then fled back to Romney when they discovered, last Thursday night, that Gingrich was a lunatic. None of which makes anything approaching sense.

How is the Republican horde still given the credibility inherent in the concept of decision-making? Do we really need to reiterate the last six months of their presidential choices?

If there's anything to be said for the Republican rank-and-file, as illuminated by three-and-a-half states so far, it's that it has looked surprisingly intelligent in dumping Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, and to've cooled to Herman Cain before he dumped himself. This, however, doesn't stand up to scrutiny; somebody had to drop out of the race, and the odds were that it would be some loon. In fact, there weren't any odds. It was a sure thing.

Speaking of which:

Last week, New York magazine’s John Heilemann pointed out a deep truth about Newt Gingrich’s peculiar presidential campaign: The very media elite that Gingrich delights in hammering has actually been in his corner all along. The press likes a horse race; the press likes outsize personalities; the press favors an underdog; and the press even takes a strange sort of delight in being ruthlessly attacked.

With luck, next week Mark Halperin will explain to Ross that the sun is hot.

Which, of course, says nothing about that segment of the Press which has tried to boost Romney out of sheer embarrassment with the rest of the Republican field. Right, Ross?

Tuesday night’s Floridian drubbing won’t change those incentives, so we can expect a last burst of media chatter about how Gingrich could still recover, ride a wilderness campaign to a Super Tuesday comeback and fight Romney tooth and nail all the way to the convention.

Media chatter=what other punditasters are saying.

But Florida’s primary was closed to independents, Florida’s electorate was as conservative and Tea Party-friendly (though not as evangelical-heavy) as South Carolina’s and Florida’s large senior population once looked like it would give Gingrich an edge. If the former speaker couldn’t even come close to beating Romney in such relatively favorable terrain, it’s hard to see how he can hope to compete with him anywhere outside the Deep South.

AKA the Republican rank-and-file. Listen, I'm not touting Gingrich, or Santorum. I'm just saying that maybe voters are looking at, you should pardon the expression, electability. Which is another way of saying that the rank-and-file is beginning to recognize that "conservatism" is a form of national poison. Maybe John Heileman can explain why that analysis never finds the light of day.

Republican voters have had a veritable ethanol-flavored beer tasting of "conservative" candidates. None got the boot for being "not conservative enough". They're gone (or going, going) because "real" "conservatives" are too nutty for the "conservative" party. And if a pure conservative is not superior to a Massachusetts Moderate, then "conservatism" no longer has any argument at all.

Dodging A Bollock

Chris Cillizza and Dan Balz, "Rick Perry to end presidential candidacy, expected to endorse Newt Gingrich". January 19

LAST week someone--I negligently failed to note who--said that Colbert hid the utmost seriousness of purpose behind being silly, while the Media hides its profound silliness behind a guise of seriousness. So:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry will end his bid for the Republican presidential nomination today and is expected to endorse former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, according to two sources familiar with his thinking.

Gingrich himself said via email this morning that all he knows is “not much. Rumors.”

[Emphasis mine.] Please, It's too late to start. And if you've decided to anyway, please aim little higher. Like off the ground.

Here's a couple of ideas: 1) What are we supposed to make of the profound silliness at the center of the Republican presidential race? and 2) Why aren't any Republicans bothered by it?

J. R. "Rick" Perry has been governor of The Republic of Texas for eleven fucking years, during which he had amply demonstrated that his wits, while perhaps sufficient to manage the world's largest manure field, fall quite a bit short of what's required for serious national office, even in our debased age. Yet Perry was treated as a Force that demanded reckoning with, long before he entered with a pratfall, and it became okay to laugh at him.

Now he's gonna toss to Gingrich, a liar, a blowhard, the world's least credible academician, a petty criminal yet too incompetent to try covering his tracks, a racist, a despiser of pettier thieves, as well as the less fortunate, and a smug little doughboy with the morals, and ethics, of a syphilitic polecat. The Press doesn't like the man. Not for any of the above, but because he speaks down to them instead of offering professional courtesy.

Four years after it nominated a laughingstock to be Vice President of the United States--and learned that she was wildly more popular among the faithful than the War Hero in the top slot--the Party of Burke Weekends at David Brooks' has offered up two talking hairdos and six--make that eight--certifiable lunatics. At every debate stop the Republican rank and file cheers, loudly and long, for dog-whistle racism, cheery threats of political violence, and expressions of a fervent and twisted distaste for anything approximating reality. What does Brooks have to say about it? What does George Eff Will have to say about it? "Gee, I wish Mitch Daniels was running"

Why Johnny Can't Read (The New York Times Book Review Without Tripping Over The Wingnut Press)

Sam Tanenhaus, "History vs. the Tea Party". January 14

SEVENTEEN-hundred forty-two words which begin with this:

FOR more than two years, conservatives have been riding a wave of Tea Party insurgency that has formed the most dynamic force in American politics, a protest movement that promised to slash taxes, close the federal deficit and remake Washington.

then spend the next 1702 trying to explain why that insightful analysis of the American political scene hasn't meant squat on the Republican Presidential trail. (SPOILER ALERT: it's not because the analysis is wrong.)

This incredible turn of events (so completely unlike 2008) has confounded poliscientists such as Matt Bai and the great minds at Politico, which is enough for Tanenhaus to conclude that the whole world is out of whack.

Oh, I'm sorry; I must've had the wrong Sam Tanenhaus there. This is the Sam Tanenhaus who wrote The Death of Conservatism in 2009, because his new Centrist Democrat in the White House was about to Ring in the Changes, sending the "revanche" wing of the GOP into a deserved, permanent life of dumbfounded Gooberness and FOX News at whatever Heartland trailer park or church basement they crawled out of in the first place. After which we'd all be able to vote for Nelson Rockefeller again, and the Republican leadership could quit pretending to be insane.

Listen, say what you like about American politics in what is for the rest of Christendom the 21st century, but it has certainly disproven earlier notions about cognitive dissonance and the incidence of exploding heads.

On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for recycling. And I have to admit that when someone says, in 2009, as the Teabaggers were gathering unwarranted free press--and as the astroturf the operation stood on was being revealed to everyone but Beltway insiders--that the revanche wing of the Republican party was going the way of the authoritarian wing of the Nazis, or the powdered hairpiece wing of the Whigs, or the flightless wing of Raphus cucullatus, and then turns around and calls them, in 2012, "the most dynamic force in American politics for more than two years", you have to admire the élan of the thing, after the vertigo passes.

And you can't argue with evidence:

An organized grass-roots revolt, its influence was decisive in the 2010 elections, when an energized base propelled Republicans to enormous gains in the House, helped secure Senate victories for fresh faces like Rand Paul and Marco Rubio and captured as many as 700 seats in state legislatures.

Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, just to use two of two names you mention, replaced, respectively Mel Martinez (the last man elected to that seat) and Jim Fucking Bunning. Jim Fucking Bunning, who, experts agree, was not the smartest man ever to figure out how to throw a ball, was reelected in 2004, at a time when he was already addressing his office door as "Mr. Ambassador". Some fucking accomplishment, Republicans snagging that seat, thanks to Teabagging.

S'funny how the Centrist Democrat routine is no more amenable to evidence than "Conservative" Republicanism, the movement it--purely dispassionately, natch--thinks we should give everything it wants, in exchange for which guys who have decided this will be even better off than they are now, and all the distasteful 19th century backwoods shenanigans which currently run the Republican party--at least its pronouncements--will magically disappear into whatever trailer park their mommas and sisters gave birth to 'em in. The evidence of Barack Obama is right there, Mr. Tanenhaus, just as the evidence that the Republican party is a collective noun for criminals, lunatics, and the irredeemably White. Its pretense to an intellectual history running from Edmund Burke to William Buckley was a joke in 1964; the people who cling to it now are public frauds. Its electoral successes have been an unmitigated disaster for this country. There's no Teabagger Revolution pushing the party to the Right; there's just the same modern Republican party, the one that only knows one direction. Aground.

The Professor And / Mary Annnn….

David Brooks, "The C.E.O. in Politics". January 12

Paul Krugman, "America Isn't a Corporation". January 12

FOUR Januarys ago (are you still here?) it fell to David Brooks to explain to the millions of Democrats who hang on his every moderate word why Barack Obama's Magic Speechifyin' should trump The Inevitable Hillary. Come Spring, of course, it was his duty to explain to that same rapt and reasonable audience that Obama the Inevitable was an empty phrasemaker. I mean turning out to be an empty phrasemaker, after further, and sadder, consideration.

Okay, so one for two ain't bad, except when it's the result of taking both sides of the same question.

I wonder aloud here how such men grab a razor each morning and manage to use it solely for shaving. It is, for want of a better word (I actually have some handy, but let's press on) a life of Letters, but Brooks, and the vast empty stretches which contain so many of his fellow Beltway pundits, seem content to behave like touts for fashion houses, blithely peddling whatever Look they have for sale at the moment, trusting that no one will remember back six months, when they were trashing it. One caucus, one primary, in the same order and on the same schedule they've been in since, I suppose, Hamilton foresaw them, and now Romney's not the guy who can't get more than one-quarter of the Republican vote while running against what even Republicans admit is a collection of stiffs rarely seen outside a big-city morgue, he's Just One Win Away. And pace Jon Stewart, it's not the fact that our nation's teleprompter readers are calling the race before it begins; it's the fact that they can safely assume that Two Weeks Ago will generally be regarded as lost in the mists and musts of ancient history.

So the clock strikes January, and the year is divisible by 4, and it's time for Brooks to write a something-less-than-honest appraisal of whichever race is still a race, which will give him "credibility" when he later decides, after much serious deliberation and a OUIJA board weekend with Edmund Burke, to back the Republican this time.

Only he does it the very same day Paul Krugman writes about the very same topic. Which must be a bit like bringing your dad's old Princess Leia trading card to Show and Tell, and finding out that that smart-ass Elrond brought the guy who played the gay robot.

Compare and contrast! Brooks' tack--which I'm sure is amenable to mathematical description, where the [U]ltimate goal of a Harding Republican victory divided by the square of the number of weeks before the [N]ominee is determined times the coefficient of [F]aux-Moderation Brooks is required to maintain yields either the angle of the backhanded swipe he pretends to take at the Republican he's rooting for, or the degree of condescension in his praise of whichever Democrat he thinks is most beatable--is, unsurprisingly, that it's not enough for Romney to've been a highly successful corporate hero. Though, he admits, this may seem a bit counterintuitive to the savvy reader.

In reality, Romney’s Bain success is largely irrelevant to the question of whether he could be a good president. The real question is whether he has picked up traits like emotional security, political judgment and an instrumental mind-set from his upbringing and the deeper experiences of life.

Get it, America? Sure, Mitt Romney is an alabaster and neatly-coiffed idol of American Mercantilism, those Builders of Iron Railways, Tillers of Rocky Soil, and Shredders of Paper Documents. But we demand more!

How much longer do you imagine it will be before Brooks has his answer? Whaddya guess it might be? (Bear in mind: Brooks knows the Brand better than anyone, and he's not gonna cheapen it by proclaiming that Romney has passed the trait test, tempered in the crucible of a Bruising Primary Season, no. Public fluffery is best left to the Kathleen Parkers.)

Does the man ever get tired of writing Civics lesson plans designed for a classroomful of earnest but none-too-bright scions of Financial empires?

Ah, hell, let's have some fun at recess...

Whether it is a George Washington, a Franklin or Theodore Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy, [the emotionally secure] president enters the White House with ease and confidence, is relatively unscathed by the criticism of the crowd, is able to separate the mask he must wear for public display from the real honest self he knows himself to be.

Plodding Plutocrat, incontinent poon hound, or class traitor.

This sense of emotional security can also be found in great military leaders, like Dwight Eisenhower, and in

Three…two…

serenely successful movie stars, like Ronald Reagan.

Whew. For a moment there I was afraid Brooks was going to forget all the serenely successful movie stars who've led our Great Nation.

A president with political judgment has a subtle feel for the texture of his circumstance. He has a feel for where opportunities lie, what will go together and what will never go together. This implicit knowledge is developed slowly in people like Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson who have spent decades as political insiders and who have a rich repertoire of experiences to draw on.

It also comes from voracious social contact. It comes to leaders who have a compulsive desire to be around people and who can harvest from a million social encounters a sense of what people want and can deliver.

More important than knowing is the sense of knowing. Kinda like Dave's restaurant reviews.

Third, great leaders have often experienced crushing personal setbacks. This experience, whether it’s Lincoln’s depression or F.D.R.’s polio, not only gives them a sense of sympathy for those who are suffering, but a personal contact with frailty. They are resilient when things go wrong. They know how dependent they are on others, how prone they are to overconfidence. They are both modest, because they have felt weakness, and aggressive, because they know how hard it is to change anything.

In Romney's case this would be the time he had to talk all five sons out of volunteering for Iraq?

In sum, great presidents are often aristocrats and experienced political insiders. They experience great setbacks. They feel the presence of God’s hand on their every move.

Unfortunately, we’re not allowed to talk about these things openly these days. We disdain elitism, political experience and explicit God-talk. Great failure is considered “baggage” in today’s campaign lingo.

Well, y'know, if this is such a serious loss, maybe y'all should have thought of that back when you were turning the Sacred into tawdry political applause lines.

And, fuck, Dave; out of the eight hobbled philosophers who once graced the Republican race--let me just double check the count here--yes, eight wear Christianity on their sleeves, including the two the other Christians don't think are Christian, and the so-called Randian, though he crouches his in his fealty to the desires of the imaginary Founders who direct his waking thoughts. Who stopped 'em? What stopped 'em, at least occasionally, was stupidity, incomprehensibility, hypocrisy, and/or a "subtle feel for the texture of their circumstances", including, in this instance, the fact that most Americans want nothing to do with snake handlers, miracle healers, and child seduction rings. That, plus the inability to make it rain on command. You guys fucking figure it out. It's not everyone else's responsibility to do it for you.

I Smell Pulitzer. Sheesh, Light A Match, Kathleen.

Kathleen Parker, "Romney's rivals serve up a heaping helping of pious baloney." January 11

SO, today's award-eligible assignment: crank out 771 words on the outrage of Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry, who are currently splitting 0.5% of the Republican vote, making such a huge issue of Mitt Romney saying he enjoys firing people, even though that's clearly Not What He Meant in Context.

Watch for Kathleen's two-volume monograph Khrushchev Didn't Really Mean "Bury" In That Way, coming this spring from Random House.

Seven-hundred seventy-one words. You'd think maybe if this was an issue she could have hit eight hundred?

Would this be something different if we hadn't been playing Gotcha in Presidential politics since Gerald Ford announced he'd never heard of the Soviet Union? Or if in the intervening thirty-five years we hadn't pretty much dredged the very concept through some particularly vile sewer system, fished it back out, run it through a Cuisinart, then had a panel of reality show producers punch it up? Hell, Romney just got done doing the precise thing to Barack Obama. How do you win a Pulitzer and remain oblivious? I'm kiddin'.

Mitt Romney made millions as a corporate raider. We don't call them "corporate borrowers". Or "corporate angels". They fucking revel in that Half-Piratical Randian I Need Viagra To Get It Up For My Poolboy But I'm A Big-Balled Capitalist Out of my Way shit. And now it's fucking unpopular? Shame on us, then, shame on you, shame on the Pulitzer committee for the last thirty years of acting as though Rich People buttfucking the rest of America was all part of Our Sacred Heritage.

And y'know what else, Kathy? Shame on Mitt Romney, too. He presents himself as a moral man. As the paragon of a moral man. And he fucked with people's livelihoods on the grounds that there was money to be made by doing so. And he was already rich. He had enough money to live comfortably. He had enough money to put less fortunate people to work, not out of it. Mitt Romney shouldn't be running for President. Mitt Romney shouldn't be griping about his words being taken out of context. Mitt Romney should be sitting alone in a room somewhere, thinking of ways to atone for how he's spent his life.

But the job-killing idea has picked up additional sauce, sticking as we are with the baloney theme, with criticism that Romney’s leadership of Bain Capital also resulted in some people losing their jobs. Indeed they did. That’s what happens sometimes when companies are purchased, salvaged from poor management, revamped and, assuming competence at the top, made profitable.

Since when in a free, capitalist nation is it a sin to buy a company and turn a profit?

Since when in America is it not a sin, or a crime, to fuck with innocent lives?

You don't have to answer me, Kathleen. I lived through the 1980 elections.

Catchy idea, though. I hope Mitt adopts it as his slogan.

Footnote To History

SHORTER Ross Douthat*: Thank you, Iowa Republicans, for winnowing the horrible** into the merely disgustingly unpalatable, preserving, in the process, the one guy with a reasonable chance of winning a national election†, the Catholic†† religious nutcase, and the beard for Republican "libertarianism"‡.

--------

* Somehow the Times found a "conservative" who's willing to put a Panglossian spin on everything that happens in the Republican party. And in public!

** Douthat: "Presented with the weakest presidential field of any major party in a generation…." I realize that, in part, this statement is the result of Douthat's sinecure; like Brooks he is occasionally required to say something refreshingly rational--likely something he overheard--in order to present himself as "'conservative' by thought", rather than, as is actually the case with both men, just another child of privilege rooting for the home team. Like the dog walking on its hind legs it isn't done well, but unlike that circus act, it seems to convince some people. At any rate, it's certainly remarkable; "conservatives", faced with a daisful of abject panderers to the entire "conservative" agenda--economic, social, and religious warfare, with a couple of complete loons thrown in for the completists--don't like any of 'em.

This is the end of the American political spectrum which went clinically and legally insane during Roosevelt's First 100 Days, and which, after a twenty-year courtship, finally convinced the Republican party to accept its troth in 1964. I was ten. There hasn't been a public admission that any flag-lapelin' Republican was wrong about anything since. These people defended Nixon. They pretended Reagan was a genius. They compared George W. Bush to Churchill. They swooned for Sarah Fucking Palin like bobbysoxers at an Elvis movie. Sure, there was some dissatisfaction with "moderates" like George H.W.H.M.O Bush, and Bob Dole, but no wingnut's come in for criticism since Nelson Rockefeller died getting a hummer.

It's a remarkable moment, and, clearly, things have gotten so bad with American "conservatism" that "conservatives" themselves have caught wind of it. Spare a moment of human-heartedness for the backers of Rick Perry. Imagine finding out, after dumping a few hundred grand into his campaign, that you actually can be too stupid for Republican voters. This time.

† So they say. To me, Romney is some committee's idea of a viable candidate. He's Bruce Babbitt. He's John Connally. He's a guy who deserves to run fourth. Just ahead of Mitch Daniels.

†† Maybe it's just me, but this--plus the fact that it's Santorum standing at the end, not Bachmann or Perry or Cain--seems to be how Douthat distinguishes between the various forms of religious mania.

Because, sheesh, of the four it's Santorum who's most likely to drag religious nutjobbery down the Hole, and take the Republican brand, 2012 Edition, down with him, if he survives long enough into the primary season that he decides he has to make Abortion (or Contraception!) a major fight. Maybe the idea here is that Santorum is so personally repugnant that "religious" "conservatives" will be convinced to vote for the "electable" guy, even if he is a Mormon. We'll leave aside the idea of one religious nut Republican being concerned about all the other religious nut Republicans, and ask how well this worked in '88 thru '96.

[By the way, Senator: the reason bringing home a fetus is creepy isn't your religious conviction vs. societal norms; it's the fact that you do what's unnatural just to make showy points about your faith, and frighten your children into eternal submission. Y'all just wanna wallow in that "Look at his precious little fingers" routine. You, or God, can refuse to forgive me, but I find it hard to believe you'd have trucked home a Petrie dish of protoplasm, or some unspeakable six-bodied frog mutant with a single staring eye in the middle, for the enlightenment of your brood; at least I hope not. If your two-year-old got hit by a bus you wouldn't scrape up the remains and put 'em on the mantle. Odds are you'd have held a funeral, like the "normal people" you impugn here. I don't doubt your sincerity. But I don't think "sincerity" means "devoid of religio-political machinations which might put the lie to it when viewed less than favorably".]

‡ Where Paul, on the other hand, serves the Grand Old Party's grand old tradition of throwing bones to the rabid like Roman emperors provided bread and circuses. Can Ron Paul actually believe the stuff he says? Can someone with a Hahvahd education really think that a continuing Paul presence in the GOP race is adding something?

Froth Is Stranger Than Friction

Mackenzie Weinger, "Gallup: Most fluid GOP primary ever". January 2

David Brooks, "Workers of the World, Unite! " (Behind a Republican). January 2

FIRST, does any one else smell fecal matter and propylene glycol?

The lead for Republican front-runner has changed seven times since May, according to a Gallup report Monday, with Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich all making it to No. 1 at some point in 2011….

Meanwhile, the Republican battle most closely mirrors the Democrats’ contest in 2003, when Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark each took a turn at the top spot, Gallup found. Before Kerry secured front-runner status at the start of the 2004 primaries, the lead changed nine times during 2003.

I'm sorry; do you remember it that way? I didn't. In fact, I didn't to the extent that I checked the original article.

And the first thing I discovered was that what was being compared was the year 2003 in the Democratic race vs the last eight months of 2011 for the Republican, probably because Republicans winter somewhere else. My own aggressively indolent research turned up Mike Huckabee leading the field--according to Gallup--last February; would Sarah Palin and Donald Trump wind up in the mix if we included the whole of January-April? Michele Bachmann didn't even make the cut, though she certainly led some polls. Is it too much to ask that someone writing for Gallup bother to look?

One of those nine Democratic ties occurred between January Early and January Mid, and consisted of the Lieberman-Kerry-Never a Candidate Daschle tie somehow transmogrifying into a Lieberman-Kerry tie. Seismographs all over the country must have been set off by that one.

Say what you wanna about the running gag that was Joementum, or how a turd like Dick Gephardt ever managed to lead a national poll, but, c'mon. In 2003, timidly attempting to ride the rising awareness of the clusterfuck in Iraq most of 'em had timidly enabled the previous summer, Democrats faced a wide-open campaign after Al Gore declined to run. That's nothing like the fortnightly hysteria for one Not Romney candidate after the next, followed by public defenestration, which has marked the GOP slug fest since last spring (and I mean "slug" as a common noun).

Look, if you just want to help the Republican party, let alone the Republic all Republicans seems to imagine tottering on the Edge, it's time to stop pretending this stuff is normal, explicable, and chockablock with historical precedent. Our politics have always been screwy; this doesn't mean the kid eating paste in third grade is indistinguishable from the serial arsonist jerking off at a fire. Self-identified and phone-answering Republicans did not hem and haw among a list of United States Senators, Representatives, and a sitting governor. They've backed--in a dizzying display that makes preteen pop culture look sedate--a moronic self-promoter with a reality show, a half-witted Jebus fanatic, another half-witted Jebus fanatic, an even-dumber pizza magnate, possibly the slimiest and most disingenuous politician in living memory, and the remaining Jebus fanatic.

You're enabling! It's bad enough doing it for the sake of Faux Balance. It's another thing entirely to do it out of a natural inclination to flinch which is part congenital and part partisan political ploy:

The Republican Party is the party of the white working class. This group — whites with high school degrees and maybe some college — is still the largest block in the electorate. They overwhelmingly favor Republicans….

The Republicans harvest their votes but have done a poor job responding to their needs.

Says David Brooks, educated on Philadelphia's Main Line and the University of Chicago, and possessor, ever since, of a series of Beltway sinecures.

Santorum is the grandson of a coal miner and the son of an Italian immigrant. For years, he represented the steel towns of western Pennsylvania. He has spent the last year scorned by the news media — working relentlessly, riding around in a pickup truck to more than 370 towns. He tells that story of hard work and elite disrespect with great fervor at his meetings.

First, there's a distinction between "scorned" and "ignored because he's a colorless, humorless professional scold who can't be separated from his 13th century worldview far enough that the press could write about him without imagining it was angering all the snake-handling religious bigots it seems convinced inhabit every Applebee's and Red Lobster between the Alleghenies and the Sierra Nevada".

Second, he's the son of a clinical psychologist and his wife, both of whom worked for the VA. This is why grandpa and the Old Country make that guest appearance. If you go back far enough, everybody's ancestor dug for something for a living. If Rick Santorum ever got calluses from a hard day's work, they were on his ass, and came from pulling all-nighters in the Dickinson Law Library.

His worldview is not individualistic. His book, “It Takes a Family,” was infused with the conservative wing of Catholic social teaching. It was a broadside against Barry Goldwater-style conservatism in favor of one that emphasized family and social solidarity.

Forgive me; I keep meaning to pick it up. And forgive me if I imagine the whole thing was more broadside at Hillary Clinton than Barry Goldwater. The religious right has had thirty years now to get out from under the yoke of secular conservatism. Seems it's a helluva lot easier impugning Mammon Conservatives in print than it is turning down their campaign contributions.

While in Congress, he was a leader in nearly every serious piece of antipoverty legislation.

For "serious" read "Republican-sponsored" and for "antipoverty" read "anti-New Deal". Santorum's name was on "compassionate" "conservative" legislation for the same reason Britney Spears' name is on some abominable simulation of perfume. Republicans inside Washington realize they can't just sever the safety net (at least they used to recognize it, back in the days when Santorum had an actual elected position), so they needed Jesus as a wingman.

On the stump, he cries, “The left has a religion, too. It’s just not based on the Bible. It’s based on the religion of self.”

You mean he doesn't mention Goldwater?

But I suspect he will do better post-Iowa than most people think — before being buried under a wave of money and negative ads. And I do believe that he represents sensibility and a viewpoint that is being suppressed by the political system. Perhaps, in less rigid and ideological form, this working-class experience will someday find a champion.

Jesus Fucking Christ. The closest that Republican dais gets to a non-Mormon, non-loony-nutjob religious babbler is Newt Gingrich, and just because he's clearly a Devout Cynic; he certainly had the sound political instincts to get himself right with God, and Catholicism, to boot (and so under the protective cloak of Abortion is Murder), before he ran. Hell, Gingrich is more "authentically" working class than Santorum. Bachmann and Cain are too, and they're just as Jesus-mazed as he is. Can't you even be bothered to try anymore, Dave? Wishing (that is, pretending to wish) for a populist Republican sans religious mania is like hoping to find a purebred mongrel.

The Calm Confidence Of The Republican Playing Liar's Poker With House Money

Haley Barbour, Sarah Palin, Mitch Daniels, and Herman Cain, "If I were campaigning for president…". December 30

I'M NOT sure which I enjoyed more here: the one-stop reminder of how easily a couple of financial industry and National Association of Manufacturers shills like Mitch Daniels and Haley Barbour could become the "voices of reason" in the Republican party, or the recognition that it is possible to be Sarah Palin, or Herman Cain, and not be the clear idiot in the Republican room.

If I were campaigning for President? They all did. Look at the results. Check out that current list of people these four couldn't beat.

(By the way, isn't Herman Cain still technically running for President? Or is the fact that he's now overtly fleecing donors just a joke the rest of us are supposed to enjoy being in on? Is that the explanation for the odd "campaigning for" construction, instead of the more natural "running for"? So the Post could include the insights of Herman Fuckhead Cain? For that matter, how much money did the other three haul in before obvious, Pawlenty-like defeat just ahead, combined with the requirements of reporting contributions, ended their campaigns? How Much Money I Made By Not Being a Presidential Candidate sounds like a much better article.)

And, if you can forgive my provincialism, neither Palin using the opportunity to push imaginary sales of her imaginary book, nor Cain repeating "Nine, Nine, Nine, Nine…" in the corner, comes close to matching Daniels' performance as the Thinking Man's Widow and Orphan Defenestrator:

Tax reform, domestic energy production and a regulatory pause must be advocated as indispensable for poor people, unemployed people and, especially, young people. All ties must be broken in favor of private growth. Today’s blind, anti-growth zealotry must be contested as the cruel, pro-poverty policy it is. Prospective reforms to save the safety net must be advanced with aggressive confidence. With survival literally at stake, and broad consensus required to enable major changes, arguments about secondary issues should be muted.

I ask you: out of Incontinent Tax Cutting*, Utter Deregulation, and Rescuing the Safety Net, which one d'ya suppose will wind up falling short under the next Republican President/ Congressional majority?

Leave us note, for the record, that Mitch Daniels had the opportunity to test-market his Prospective Reform magic on the safety net of the 15th most populous state in the nation, with solid Republican legislatures behind him, and created instead a $1 billion computer-system boondoggle he is currently spending much of his Not Campaigning time trying to figure out how to avoid testifying about in open court.

And while you'd think that seven years of Daniels had inured me to his "intellectual" antics, it's Palin's, and Cain's, garden-variety (if weed-choked) cupidity which are almost comforting in their familiarity; Daniels' faux-populist concern for "jobs"--from a governor who, freed from last year's demand to look like he might be considering a Presidential campaign, not just a capital-raising venture, is all set to back this year's Right to Work push by the Indiana state legislature--still turns my stomach.

But, mostly, what I'll never get used to is this "broad consensus" bullshit which insists on "stressing our commonality", just so long as it's that portion of commonality Mitch Daniels has for sale; everyone else is "blind". It's the consensus-building of the fundamentalist preacher, which Daniels assuredly is. And it'd be different were it some sort of untried solution to the millennial doom Daniels insists we're headed for, and not the same old shit he's helped peddle for thirty-some years, the same shit that got us into this mess in the first place, without his even the having the courtesy to find some new bottles to shovel it into.


_____________

* Daniels tax "cutting" as governor of Indiana owes less to the theories of Milton Friedman than to Friedman's predecessor, Phineas Taylor Barnum.

Funny, The Actual Confederate Army Spent A Lot Of Time Retracing The Campgrounds, Looking For Edible Kernels Of Corn In Piles Of Horseshit, Too.

Jindal tells Iowans that Rick Perry is the best choice for the GOP.

AND I'm indebted to Halloween Jack for pointing out the picture above, at Roy's:

Not a lot to add to the commentary on the text; I just wanted to mention the picture that accompanies the article, in which Perry possesses the mien of a used-car dealer who is telling you that the car that you're looking at is a great car, a steal really, and you know that he's full of shit and he knows that you know that he's full of shit, but it's all that you can afford and you need to get to work and you can already see the days ahead when you're cursing the damn thing as it falls apart around you in slow motion. I hesitated to use the used-car-dealer metaphor, because it's been a political cliche ever since Nixon, but it fits so well here.

I know I sound absurd, or more absurd than usual, but I still say it was a major failing of the Nixon era that a half-dozen years later a man who looked like Ronald Reagan--the death rictus, the coiffure of one of Larry Welk's minimum-wage singing stars, the practiced Hollywood carriage--Reagan moved like a man who was accustomed to being carried everywhere, and not in the character-building, struggle-just-for-a-normal-existence way FDR was; more like a foot-bound Chinese wife--and that orange dye-job which he insisted, until he couldn't remember to, wasn't a dye job, not because that fooled anybody but because he felt obligated to sound like he'd fooled himself--could become President. No matter what came out of his mouth. Which, mind you, was even worse, but that's beside the point.

Who, in 2011, is fooled by that Perry air? It's a look that screams "Hi, my intellectual vapidity is only exceeded by my unwarranted self-regard". It's a look that traces at a glance the last thirty years of American social and economic decline.

It's not just the picture of a guy who's been carefully schooled in how to look for the camera. It's a picture of a guy who's been carefully schooled in how to look for the camera because his handlers fear that some stray shot some day might actually reveal his actual soul. Which is so awful that laughable plastic routine up there is preferable.

I swear to God, it may very well have been my callow youth which convinced me, in the early 70s, that by the time I was middle-aged people in America would be meeting at the local bar to drink beer, swap lies, and pass around joints, or that American foreign policy would no longer mean aiming billion-dollar aircraft carriers at Third World nations. But I was absolutely convinced that the risible hard sell and ring-a-ding-ding insincerity of black & white television advertising was dead as the Dodo, and I still can't figure out what happened there.

Being A Deep Thinkers In The Republican Party Is Like Trying To Set A Diving Record In The Shallow End Of The Pool

Ross Douthat, " 'Strong Commentary' on the 2012 Election Consisting of Restating What George Eff Will Just Got Done Saying". December 13

Most important, [Gingrich and Paul] represent two very different endpoints for the Tea Party movement. Paul, for all his crankishness, is the kind of conservative that Tea Partiers want to believe themselves to be: Deeply principled, impressively consistent, a foe of big government in nearly all its forms (the Department of Defense very much included), a man of ideas rather than of party.


Gingrich, on the other hand, is the kind of conservative that liberals believe most Tea Partiers to be – not a genuine “don’t tread on me” libertarian, but a partisan Republican whose unstinting support for George W. Bush’s deficit spending morphed into hand-wringing horror of “socialism” once a Democrat captured the Oval Office….

So Iowa Tea Partiers face a choice. If the town hall crashers and Washington Mall marchers of 2009 settle on a Medicare Part D-supporting, Freddie Mac-advising, Nancy Pelosi-snuggling Washington insider as their not-Romney standard bearer in 2012, then every liberal who ever sneered at the Tea Party will get to say “I told you so.” If Paul wins the caucuses, on the other hand, the movement will keep its honor – but also deliver the Republican nomination gift-wrapped to Mitt Romney.

LET'S start with Romney. I have no idea who, if anyone (besides Mitt Romney), benefits from a Romney campaign. That said, neither your certifiable party, nor the country it supposedly loves so much that other people should die for it, is served by how how he's conducted himself, nor by how that's been met. In 2008 Romney clearly brought a new definition of the world "pander" to national campaigning, which is an accomplishment on par with bringing new meaning to the world "pander" in the field of pandering.

But is Romney condemned for this (or for being a shallow, content-free, Mad Ave candidate with nothing to offer but scads of his own cash)? Of course not. He's condemned by the Republican electorate because the views he used to have don't qualify as True Conservative.

What an amazingly high opinion y'all have of yourselves, especially compared to how little you have to show for it, and the near absence of intellectual development since the days when every American knew what Quemoy and Matsu were.

And y'know, Ross, I love a good David Weigel impression as much as the next guy: "Teabaggers view themselves as principled, non-partisan hewers of oak who openly mock the Republican party's Chip Dispersal Guidelines. And Liberals scoff." Because the fact is that 1) Republicans did support the "Bush" budgets which, in point of fact, should be noted as Republican-, or effective-Republican-controlled Congressional budgets; if the Democrats had controlled the Congress during the Bush years you'd be blaming those deficits on them, the way you tried to do with Reagan (while ignoring the fact that Democratic Congresses in the 80s actually spent less than Reagan proposed); 2) that the "Defense Department included" business will have standing once it means something to anything other than Ron Paul's poll numbers; and 3) ditto with the supra-party jazz, which hasn't caused either Paul to switch allegiances, has it?

This is like saying that British Petroleum believes it is helping the environment, while "critics" complain about its actual record. They're not two ways of looking at data. They are, in reverse order, data, and self-serving bullshit.

I do understand that you, like Weigel, grew up in a cosseted environment where such disputes are supposed to be considered Two Sides of One Coin, so that you can conveniently stamp on unopposed. And I apologize for it. Not that it was my doing. It's just that I missed the chance to gun down Roone Arledge in 1976, and you might've grown up understanding that an argument is something you're required to make.

On the other hand, Ross, nothing excuses taking the Iowa caucuses seriously.