The Rich Get Bitchier

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at the not-so-triumphant return of the Romneys.

So, what have they learned since the drubbing Mitt took last November?

Not a thing.

Here's the opening shot:

"It’ll be tough to hear this, I know, but Mitt and Ann Romney are still confused, bitter and just plain sick-to-death over the fact that they’re not in the White House right now. I mean, when you pay for something — whether it be goods or services — you’re supposed to receive it. That’s how the system works. It’s certainly the way it’s always worked for the Romneys in the past. It’s what makes this nation great, dammit, and if you make a deal with the country that involves spending millions of dollars for the presidency of the United States, then the country reneges on that deal, what results is anarchy. How can rich people ever trust the value of their money and privilege again?

I have no doubt you’ve missed the Romneys since the destiny Mitt had been promised since birth slammed headlong into the ugly reality of what the American people actually wanted. If Mitt Romney’s lightning-fast exile to historical oblivion shocked you, trust me, it shocked Mitt, Ann and the rest of their family even more."

Read the Rest Here

Vote and Die

And to add one final insult and indignity to his life -- all I can do is laugh about this.

Gawker: Florida Man Angry Over Election Writes Out "Fuck Obama" Before Killing Himself/11.14.12

Now if only we can turn this kind of thing into a trend, we'll have something.

Kelly Grrrl

Today's column for the Daily Banter sends a little bit of love to Megyn Kelly -- who I have to admit redeemed herself somewhat over the past few days.

Here's the opening shot:

I never thought I'd say this but I'm kind of liking Megyn Kelly right about now.

I realize that in the past I've been pretty mean to her, saying that she "comes off like an extravagantly groomed chihuahua who's very angry about being left in somebody's Louis Vuitton handbag for too long" and insulting her mini-spread in GQ magazine, among other often admittedly petty nastiness. I say these things because she really does know how to peg the insufferability meter among Fox News's cadre of interchangeable blondes -- and also because I enjoy being a prick sometimes. But I have to give credit where credit is due: She's willing to turn that look that combines condescension, incredulity and revulsion -- the one that's become her trademark -- on just about anybody, even, apparently, Karl Rove.

Read the Rest Here

Reason #1,373 Why "The Onion" Rules

After Obama Victory, Shrieking White-Hot Sphere Of Pure Rage Early GOP Front-Runner For 2016

The Bubble Bursts

Sorry, but I can't stop going back to Fox News's reaction to last night's Obama victory because it's just so fascinating on so many different levels. It really is shocking how quickly and dramatically the wheels came off the entire operation and how a group of people who are dedicated to relentlessly pushing their agenda would break down and allow their political enemies so much delicious, tears of unfathomable sadness-style, schadenfreude. They had to know that by behaving this way -- taking the loss of their fully backed candidate with such indignity -- they'd be personally providing their critics with plenty of salt to rub into their wounds.

Of course if you believe that Fox News doesn't just cynically generate an epistemic bubble for its viewers but actually lives inside it as well then it makes perfect sense that this would be the reaction when that bubble explodes all over them.

Some of the best things said about the sadness, desperation and complete loss of professionalism over at Fox so far:

"(It) looks like it was scripted by Ricky Gervais... Last night, Roger Ailes' walls came tumbling down. Because their foundations were not based in reality, just ratings. Fox deserves a great deal of credit for re-electing president Obama. Because they refused to see who he actually was, they could not effectively counter him. They countered a figment of their imagination - and it was a particularly nasty, bilious, mean figment. Their universe became a black hole last night, sucking almost all of them in."

-- Andrew Sullivan

"What is unusual–really, one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen on cable news–is for one arm of a network to basically turn against itself on-air. 'Here’s what we’re going to do!' said anchor Bret Baier. 'We’re going to get someone from the decision desk and we’re going to bring them in here and we’re going to have them on air and we’re going to interview them about this decision.' That’s right: One of you nerds had better get in here and explain yourselves to Karl Rove! You have made an important Republican very upset!

It was a fitting moment for an election that often seemed to be a campaign over the idea of mathematical knowability itself. But it was also a glaring, and embarrassing, example of the extent to which Fox News has become an arm of the Republican Party and is expected by GOP operatives to behave as one. Rove may be a party big shot, but he’s just a guy giving analysis on Fox’s air. He does not run the network, even if his friends do.

And yet apparently no one in Fox’s studio felt empowered to tell him that, just because he’d raised a squillion dollars for his Republican SuperPAC this election, he is not entitled to have the decision desk hauled out to answer to him like chefs who sent out an undercooked steak. It’s the sort of thing that might cause you to examine your mission as a journalistic network. I’m not waiting up for that to happen, though.

In the end, Rove is a numbers guy too, and he finally had to concede to the arithmetic–but not before creating a defining image of a partisan, and a network, at war with the very reality it could not avoid reporting. Kelly, who at least took the whole interlude in good humor, at one point deadpanned, 'That’s awkward.' Yes, it was. And kind of amazing."

-- James Poniewozik of Time Magazine

"The Right used ideology as the intellectual underpinning of their projections, while everyone else used facts. Nate Silver isn’t a mystic or the modern incarnation of Nostradamus – he’s an extraordinarily thorough polling analyst who bases predictions on a formula that accounts for real world margins of error and reporting discrepancies. It isn’t perfect, but the methodology is pretty airtight when it comes to projecting accurate odds. That’s why every half decent political analyst took Silver’s projections seriously and discounted the Right wing noise machine when it came to picking a winner."

-- Ben Cohen at the Daily Banter

One other possibility, at least as far as one guy's reaction is concerned: Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS superPAC spent nearly $300-million on Romney. If you'd just watched that much money go down the drain in one bad bet, you'd probably be angry too.

Quote of the Day

"We have a choice: we can become a shrinking regional party of middle-aged and older white men, or we can fight to become a national governing party. And to do the latter we have to fix our Hispanic problem as quickly as possible, we’ve got to accept science and start calling out these false equivalencies when they occur within our party about things that are just not true, and not tolerate the intolerant."

-- Republican strategist John Weaver

Bingo.

Forget the fiscal cliff. The GOP just went over the demographic cliff, one which they've spent years recklessly plowing full-speed-ahead toward. They have only themselves to blame.

Time's Up

Yes, I admit it: Once the race was called for Barack Obama last night, I immediately suggested to the people I was hanging out with that we switch the channel over to Fox News. I expected it to be interesting. I didn't expect it to be as interesting as it was. Watching the entire operation publicly deflate -- with Karl Rove refusing to accept reality and Megyn Kelly actually getting up and walking over to the "decision desk" to demand answers -- was honestly one of the damndest things I've witnessed in a very long time.

But Bill O'Reilly's bitter, crestfallen soliloquy on how America isn't really America anymore was the most memorable moment. Memorable because of how disconcertingly comfortable O'Reilly is with his own racism and xenophobia and also because he simultaneously acknowledged what some of us have been warning for a while -- namely that the Republican party in its current form simply can't survive and will soon be demographically pushed into extinction -- while making it clear that Fox News likely intends to now double down on the extremist rhetoric aimed at the dwindling resentful-old-white-guy crowd.

O'Reilly's sullen little rant is the statement of a man who's just had it finally made clear to him that he's not in charge anymore.

Listening Post

Worn out, overcome and still exhilarated this morning. Still have a ton of work on my desk that needs attending to so it'll be light around here, unfortunately.

Here's Snow Patrol -- In the End.

Thanks, America. I knew you had it in you.

Skew You

Today's column for the Daily Banter, the last before election day tomorrow, takes a look at how NBC is trying to ward off criticism from the right by preemptively "unskewing" its polls that show Barack Obama ahead.

Here's the opening shot:

"For some time now, I’ve been making the argument that claims of a liberal media bias — at least insofar as what’s actually produced by most American news outlets — amount to a bunch of nonsense. The reason for this is simple: The right has created such a magnificently run cottage industry out of hectoring news operations for supposedly being a bunch of pointy-headed, overeducated elitists — making them, by their very nature, anti-conservative — and it’s done it for so long that most newsrooms now preemptively police themselves in an effort to ward off any potential criticism from the right. It’s of course a losing game, because the reality is that no amount of self-censoring or general bending over backwards will make media critics on the right happy since the stories of the liberal media boogeyman are now an article of faith for conservatives; they need that boogeyman to justify their willingness to deny any reality that threatens to pop the epistemic bubble that keeps them safe. It’s imperative for the right to retain the ability to dismiss out of hand any news that makes it mad as being the work of political enemies who can’t under any circumstances be trusted."

Read the Rest Here

Quote of the Day

"(President Obama puts us on) a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty and compromises those values -- those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us a great and exceptional nation in the first place."

-- Paul Ryan, on a town hall-style call last night with social conservatives, organized by Ralph Reed

Uh-huh. I'll refer you to yesterday's post here.

Assistant Quote of the Day

"Hardcore conservatism’s loathing of science has lurked around GOP politics for so long that it's easy to forget how nasty it is. Over 40 years, that disdain has slid from 'pointy-headed intellectuals' to something very like a jock slapping a math book out of a kid’s hands and saying, 'NICE NUMBERS, FAG.' But this is what you do when you can’t crunch the numbers yourself or when they will not save you. You shoot the messenger."

Gawker's Mobutu Sese Seko on the sudden, virulent rage directed at Nate Silver from the right and how it's manifested itself in a dismissal of his numbers as being the work of an obviously gay guy

Seriously, read Seko's post from start to finish. If nothing else it's worth it just to hear him refer to "Unskewed Polls" idiot Dean Chambers as "the Meat Loaf of numbers" who "corrects for bias in polls by making them say things that don’t make him angry" and whose polling results "are generated in the same way that a kid turns an F into an A by drawing an extra bar down the right side of it."

Vote Abby 2012

I think I speak for all of us when I say that this little girl speaks for all of us.

Quote of the Day

"Does deploying these ads at the last minute really seem like a move from a campaign that feels confident it’s going to win? These are some of the ugliest and most dishonest attacks of an unusually ugly and dishonest campaign. They’re the kind of ads you expect from a secretive outside group, not the campaign itself. They’re the kind of ads a campaign keeps in a glass case labeled, 'Break in case of emergency.' They feel desperate."

-- Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald on the rash of almost unimaginably dishonest last-minute campaign ads from the Romney camp and what they may say about its state-of-mind heading into election day

Romney's spent the past several months running the most brazenly mendacious campaign modern politics has ever seen -- one that goes far beyond the kind of pernicious spin we've come to expect from political candidates and into the realm of flat-out, easily debunked, staggeringly audacious lying. The idea that he could get any worse than he's been since the campaign began in earnest is kind of tough to wrap your head around -- and yet it's happening. When you lie so bombastically that the very people you're attempting to endear yourself to begin not simply calling you out for it but publicly saying that your surrogates who spread the same lie are "full of shit" -- that's when you know you're a scam-artist who's making the most desperate and cynical play for power the American people have probably ever seen in any of their lifetimes.

Storm Scourge

Today's column for the Daily Banter is, I admit, a bit of a retread of what I posted here yesterday regarding the GOP's inexplicable demonization of government workers like teachers, police and firefighters -- and how it should be forced to account for that view in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

I expand a little bit on the subject.

Here's a quick excerpt:

"The fact remains that Romney would decimate FEMA if elected — because FEMA is a governmental agency and the government is an intolerable evil to today’s Republicans, an affront to American individualism and personal responsibility that should be put asunder whenever and wherever possible. This overarching article of faith extends well beyond big, robust entities like FEMA, though. These days, Republican ire and derision is aimed not simply at the programs and agencies themselves but at the average people working for them. And that’s why I’m curious that no one has, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, forced Romney, Ryan and the rest of the Republican deficit-hawks and archenemies of government to confront another of their recent public crusades.

Read the Rest Here

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"Nate Silver seems to have some weird allegedly statistics-based process where he analyzes the data from polls and predicts which candidate will win a state or an election and he assigns a percent chance they will win it. I don't see any validity to it at all and certainly I don't view it as any kind of 'scientific' process. It entirely seems like voodoo statistics to me and it might as well be entirely made up what he comes up with. Imperfect as it is, and it can only be imperfect, the only real way to predict the results of any political election contest is to conduct surveys and polls."

-- Dean Chambers, founder of the conservative panic-assuaging website "Unskewed Polls," which predicts that Mitt Romney will win by a virtual landslide next week because, well, he will

So there you have it. Translation: Math = voodoo. Brought to you in the form of a barely comprehensible word salad by a guy who's entire "scientific process" involves indiscriminately pulling numbers out of his ass.

We're so far beyond parody at this point. The very notion of "Unskewed Polls" is like a Mobius strip of meta-stupidity. I'm really beginning to think that the entire modern conservative movement is coming from the mind of Charlie Kaufman, who's discovered that somehow what he writes truly does become reality.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"What you are going to see over the next week is an overt effort by Democrats to politicize the issue of disaster response. They’re right to do it. Conservatives are already complaining about this, but the attempt to wall disaster response off from politics in the aftermath of a disaster is an attempt to insulate Republicans from the consequences of their policies... The GOP is the party arguing for splurging on a long vacation at the beach rather than repairing the roof. Naturally, they want to have this argument only when it’s sunny and never when it’s raining. There’s no reason to accommodate them."

-- New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait on why it's essential for the Democrats to use Hurricane Sandy to point out the political differences between President Obama and Mitt Romney

I'm not sure I can add anything to that.

The Pulpit Bullies

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at what a vote for Mitt Romney inadvertently rewards: the scorched-earth, hostage-taking politics of the right.

Here's the opening shot:

"One of the realities of modern politics that I’ve never been able to get my head fully around is the desperate desire of the right to revel in the suffering of its political adversaries. I get that I shouldn’t be surprised by it, since it’s the traditional behavioral pattern of most schoolyard bullies, but it’s still always seemed staggeringly unproductive — not to mention dangerous for the country — to rally around a cause or candidate solely because doing so “pisses off liberals.” Things like hypocrisy, the naked contradiction of previously embraced views and the potential detriment to self-interest don’t even enter the conservative thought process these days so long as something provides an opportunity to point and laugh. I think this goes to the argument that modern conservatives seem to be interested only in power for power’s sake, while just about everyone else across the political spectrum is interested in actually governing; it doesn’t matter if they act like children because they’re not really in it to make a difference anyway. Mitt Romney is, in many ways, the living embodiment of this cynical political ethos — or at the very least the current world champion of exploiting it."

Read the Rest Here

The Perfect Political Storm

Today's column for the Daily Banter, as you might imagine, has to do with Hurricane Sandy -- and its potential effect on the 2012 presidential election.

Here's the opening shot:

"Well, if you wanted a surprise just before the election, you got one: a late-October hurricane that practically defies explanation and description, a once-in-a-lifetime superstorm named Sandy. The storm is now pummeling the Eastern Seaboard, bringing 90-mile-an-hour winds, blistering sheets of rain and severe flooding to some of the country’s largest metropolises and most heavily populated suburban areas. And the worst is yet to come; as of this writing Sandy hasn’t even officially made landfall yet and its aftermath is sure to last days and potentially even weeks and months. In the end, this will likely wind up being an epic natural disaster. It’s certainly not the time to talk about politics — and yet in some ways it’s exactly the time to talk about politics as well as policy."

Read the Rest Here

Reality Check

Cesca is my partner in quite a few internet endeavors these days so it's rare I come right out and push his stuff here because I really don't have to. His piece over at the Daily Banter today, though, is required reading for anyone still trying to take President Obama down from the left -- over drone strikes, the drug war, supposed broken promises, etc. -- and those still thinking that in the current climate and with political reality being what it is, voting for a Gary Johnson or a Jill Stein is a nice little "screw you" to Obama and the two-party system in general.

Bob lays out in detail the reasons why, as trite a cliché as it may sound, a vote against Obama or an abstinence from the process altogether in the name of protest really is a vote for Romney -- and a vote for a disastrous near-future for this country.

I've always felt that those who relentlessly hector Obama from the left and center-left need to come to terms with the idea of "smart accountability" -- namely that you're never going to get a perfect candidate since that's not the way our system works and it's better to have someone in office who for the most part shares your ideals and delivers you political victories, say, 70% of the time than someone who stands in stark contrast to everything you hold dear and will give you nothing you want.

Anyway, take a look at Cesca's piece -- and be sure to circulate it to the pissy, sanctimonious friends on Facebook who continue to browbeat you about how Obama has let them down.

The Daily Banter: Anti-Obama Progressives are Voting for a Romney Disaster/10.29.12

Quote of the Day

"Mitt Romney is a very different candidate, one with the vision and determination to cut through business-as-usual politics and finally put this country back on the path to the zombie apocalypse."

-- Joss Whedon, who, I believe now more than ever, is god