Take Five (Did You Hear His Middle Name’s Hussein edition)

ONE: Q – What’s the difference between the Republican Party and a flat earth society? A – It’s a trick question. There is no difference.

With a second Obama term looking more and more assured, Republicans across the nation are hurrying to make complete dicks of themselves about it, blathering shrilly about everything from the ascendancy of an Obama-nurtured caliphate, to fraudulent electronic birth and Selective Service records, to everybody’s guns being confiscated, to conservatives being thrown into FEMA concentration camps, to Michelle Obama destroying America’s youth with healthy food, to Stalinist death panels for granny, to <insert dimwitted, hysterical conspiracy theory here>.

In other words, all the same stale crap we’ve been hearing for four years, just louder and more urgent than usual.

Take Alabama Republican Party chair Bill Armistead, for example. Armistead, eager to avoid talking about, you know, policy and stuff, put on his film critic hat for a gathering of the Eastern Shore Republican Women last week...

Nance Greggs: Wha, wha, WHAT?

Not that the Romney campaign hasn’t been just chock full of silliness thus far, but the past week has been particularly amusing. The MSM bobbleheads, along with their GOP string-pullers, are beside themselves, gasping in disbelief as Romney’s numbers continue to plummet.

I remember the launch of Romney’s campaign. It was met with a smug this will be a slam-dunk attitude by many who, I can only assume, were completely unfamiliar with the man, his demeanor and his background.

It would seem clear to anyone with a dollop of common sense (and that may be the problem here, the incredible lack thereof) that Romney was a catastrophe waiting to happen – and he lost no time proving it.

For my friends across the aisle, let me spell it out for you. And, as always, feel free to seek assistance when you don’t understand the big words...

Planning to Vote for Romney?

If you’re planning to vote for Mitt Romney in November, I can only assume the following:

You’re relieved that his campaign isn’t dictated to by fact-checkers – because facts totally confuse you.

You’re not bothered that he amassed a fortune by outsourcing US jobs – because yours wasn’t one of them.

You’re duly impressed by the fact that he’s not afraid to look you straight in the eye when he lies to you.

You’ve traditionally voted for the candidate who owns a car elevator...

TSW #36

Jeff Rosenzweig: TSW #36

It’s a mercy that I caught every moment of prime time TV coverage of the Democratic convention (mostly via PBS, where the daft commentary was generally kept to a minimum, at least when David Brooks wasn’t talking). If I’d had to depend on certain myopic print and internet pundits for a retroactive overview, I’d be as hopelessly clueless about the event as they are.

Others, of course, aren’t myopic at all; they just have a naked agenda. In post-truth America, anyone can have a soapbox and say just as many patently untrue things as the mood, or the paymaster, might dictate. And it pays; there’s always someone somewhere – or thousands, or even millions – who, no matter the transparency of the falsehoods being pushed, will take the bullshit straight up. Recently, for instance, I ran across an absolutely remarkable Wall Street Journal piece by Charles G. Koch, a gentleman whose name, in some bright and, let us hope, not too distant future, will be as synonymous with “traitor” as Benedict Arnold’s. Koch’s piece is entitled “Corporate Cronyism Harms America.”

That’s sort of like Jerry Sandusky penning an impassioned appeal to street-proof your kids, or A-Rod bemoaning the effect of performance-enhancing substances on baseball, or David Koresh doing a PSA spotlighting the perils of cults.

Steve Huntley of the Chicago Sun-Times contributed a piece on the convention that splits the difference between the myopic and the agenda-driven. It reads suspiciously as though it had been written before a single speaker had taken the stage in Charlotte, although Huntley inserted a glib reference to the President’s and the ex-President’s speeches that could just as easily have been based on an intuitive notion of how they would unfold as on the actual speeches themselves. Huntley has a lot to say, most of it so utterly silly it’s hardly worth responding to, but responding to this sort of tripe is why TSW exists, so here goes...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2012/09/24/tsw-36/

Walter Rhett: The American Promise

Mitt Romney built that. His own quiet corner of wealth from which he could think about so many Americans who didn’t pay their taxes but held out their hands. Romney, who is pushed as caring, compassionate, recoiled. “I can’t help them,” he said. “They won’t take responsibility for their lives.” Mitt Romney wants to take responsibility for our government. He wants the reins of power for the world’s largest economy, the executive authority of the world’s largest government budget, the cooperation of a Congress that is eager to break the oldest American promise, cited in the Declaration of Independence, that for citizens government will “effect their Safety, Happiness, and Prudence,” and that these shall not be changed for “transient causes.”

In the world Mitt Romney built, wealth is the only permanence. He speaks of it when he says he can create jobs; he means somebody got paid. When he describes business as a basic criterion for leadership he means wealth. When he says Jews possess a quality missing in the Palestinians, he is speaking about wealth. His money is all overseas, but it is never far from his thoughts and he doesn’t get why it should matter except to others like him.

Then, at a meeting of the rich, he visits an epiphany, a really old, worn-out cliché: the rest of us are busy being dependent. We hate success. He, Trent Lott and others give it a third-person makeover: government is creating dependency and division. Romney promises to make it stop. To break faith with “Safety, Happiness, and Prudence.” Romney promises to restore delusion, fear, and especially the blind indifference of planters draped in the mantle of success (and receipts!) from their work farms of tobacco, cotton, and rice—when power and wealth knew no limits.

When the rust began to eat the edges of his thin veneer, he tried a new coat of paint. His views of the rest of us were expressed inelegantly. Really? What elegant words does he have for seniors, students, veterans, the poor, the unemployed, the undocumented, the underpaid, those without the right to work that Romney fired and whose benefits and pensions he killed for his own bonuses and fees? How do you unite a country by telling half of it citizens their safety and happiness is a problem and only a transient concern? Romney bewails others as dividing America when he had divvied it up long ago when he built his world view and his ideas about governing and sent his money offshore...

Take Five (Aw, Shut Up edition)

ONE: Family Circus of Horrors

Among the persistent annoyances of modern life, like “smart” phones, white kids desperate to make the world think they just came straight outta Compton, and those infuriating micro-commercials that have started to crop up between batters in televised ballgames, one stands out as especially irksome. His name is Dick Cheney.

Everybody’s favorite scabrous, loathsome heap of lurid hell-spawn crawled out of the anus of Satan into the daylight last Tuesday (which, not at all incidentally, was September the 11th) to vomit forth a few sulfurous lies about the President before disappearing back up the Great Deceiver’s bunghole.

Actually, it was a little less dramatic than that. The retired war criminal simply had a spokesperson send an e-mail on his behalf to Tucker Carlson’s scurrilous website The Daily Caller, in which Cheney fulminated:

“If President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden…

Nance Greggs: To Rick (Google for more info) Santorum

Dear Lil’ Ricky:

Well, I see I am still on your e-mail list, Ricky. And as long as you are going to continue spewing your nonsense into my inbox, I am going to continue to respond.

Your latest missive is what I have come to expect; a combination of fact-free rhetoric based on RW talking points and a sputtering display of verbal ineptitude.

“The incidents in Cairo and Benghazi are tragic. As we continue to learn more details, we must look to the immediate future and ask ourselves what does America stand for, and how will we stand for it?”

Your piss-poor grammar aside (something we’ve grown used to from Republicans), perhaps you should have cautioned your candidate, Mr. Romney, about the wisdom of learning more details before opening one’s mouth. But that’s all blood under the bridge now, and your chosen standard-bearer is learning that lesson the hard way...

Walter Rhett: Doubt and Absent Details

Milt Romney’s campaign reveals three phrases. First: “failed,” which labeled every idea, action, and presidential step as wrong. Second: “blame,” which faulted micro-community trends and global, macro-trends as Obama’s mistakes. The third and current: “doubt,” which assesses Obama’s body of work (policy, personal character) as inadequate and intolerable. “Failed” delivered body blows during the primaries and after; “blame” launched before the NCAAP speech and continued to the convention. “Doubt” now deepens (“He’s a good man,” “he just doesn’t get it.”) and opens the door to failure and blame to conclude that Obama is (no doubt!) irretrievable.

Anger, fear, and disgust are the three top notes of the Romney campaign, but fail, blame, and doubt give the campaign a sophisticated emotional strategy, a multi-tiered series of complex steps to channel outrage and hostility into exuberance against President Obama and votes for Romney.

Analysts missed these subtle but powerful changes of tone and direction, especially the introduction of doubt, with its list of lies as evidence that enables hate to be embedded in the open. Why doubt now? Doubt is civil but deadly. “I doubt” sounds more humane than “I hate.” Doubt is the transformative stage, the call for action, an emotion of assessment and judgement. Doubt casts its shadow on the future, is put forth as the decision paradigm. It appeals to all with rigid or mixed feelings about Obama.

The President’s response, which is to ignore the attacks by discussing America’s future, rightly points out that unless we go forward, nothing will change. In fact, matters will get worse–especially if we accept an appeal to our worst instincts. Three things any elder can tell you about living: rough patches in life occur without being anybody’s fault and with little you can do except weather the storm until conditions change; look high and low before you abandon a search; and you can’t pour corn from an empty sack...

Nance Greggs: An Open Letter to George Will et al.

My Dear Mr. Will (and cohorts):

During a recent guest appearance on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, you made the statement that Mitt Romney would be “a much better president than the one we’ve got.”

It’s a remark we’ve been hearing from many on your side of the aisle for months now, along with comments about what a great president Romney would make.

I have but one simple question for you and your colleagues who keep repeating this meme: You believe Mitt Romney would make a great president based on exactly what?

One would think that before expressing an opinion about someone’s ability to successfully handle the most powerful position on the planet, there would be some basis for that opinion, some past record to be pointed to as evidence of same, some demonstration of the skills required, some actual support for so lofty an opinion of his capabilities...

Nance Greggs: Us v. Them

While watching the coverage of both the Republican and Democratic national conventions over the past two weeks, I heard a lot from the political analysts, pundits and MSM bobbleheads about the ideological differences between the parties.

At this juncture in our political history, I believe the difference between the GOP and the Dems is a simple one, which the respective parties’ conventions made glaringly obvious. This is no longer a fight between groups who have different visions of America, or how those differing visions should be pursued. It is a fight between intelligent adults and childlike stupidity.

Republican adherents are not low-information voters; they are low-IQ voters. And therein lies the greatest difference between us and them.

As was made evident by the speakers at the RNC, from the lesser-known personalities right up to the presidential and VP candidates themselves, they were preaching to a choir they know to be too dumb to find the church without directions written in block letters in crayon...