Quote of the Day

"Governor Romney is a tremendous improvement. I think we could have been even more of an improvement, but that's, you know, that's, that, that, that, that issue was passed. Uh, Governor Romney is an important and dramatic improvement, and that's why we're behind him."

-- Rick Santorum, endorsing Mitt Rommey, sort of

Cesca's been keeping track, in pretty hilarious fashion, of the ways in which "Romney Fever" is sweeping across the nation -- cataloging instance after pulse-pounding instance of Romney receiving effusive, full-throated support from Republicans.

Add this one to the mix.

The White Knight Rises (Complete)

The Full Text of My Most Recent Piece for the Daily Banter

The important thing to keep in mind as you watch Mitt Romney's brand new campaign ad -- the one that officially kicks off his general election push for the White House -- is that everything you're seeing, and not seeing, is intentional. We've witnessed some pretty impressive missteps and gaffes from the Romney camp over the last several months, but make no mistake: The advertising of a presidential candidate is a tightly choreographed piece of theater where nothing is done spur-of-the-moment and nothing is left to chance. Penetrating the psychology of your target audience is too important -- that audience is always shown exactly and only what the campaign and its promotional team want it to see.

What this means is that it's not an accident that every face you see in Romney's new "Promise of America" ad is white. Every single one. While there may be the back of a head shown for a split-second, there isn't a person of color to be found anywhere in the two-and-a-half minute spot that features Mitt Romney, all chiseled central casting looks and very carefully edited diction, vowing to restore our country to its former greatness as Hans Zimmer-style orchestration swells to a sweeping crescendo. And again, while over the next few days you're probably going to hear a lot of people talk about how this is a huge oversight on the part of the Romney campaign, it absolutely is not. It's exactly according to plan. Because Romney knows who he has to win over in a commanding way and right out of the gate -- white, Christian middle-Americans either outwardly reeling or quietly concerned over what they see happening to "their" country.

Only breathtaking incompetence on the part of Team Romney would lead to a campaign ad in which a substantial portion of the electorate -- one growing at an exponential rate -- wasn't represented at all, even in the interest of cynical pandering. Sure, Romney spokesman Eric Fehnstrom screwed up royally by coming right out and admitting that his guy is an "Etch-a-Sketch" who can erase his positions and draw entirely new ones at will, but that was an off-the-cuff comment -- this is a carefully constructed promotional campaign. And what the Romney camp is saying with this is unmistakable: Regardless of the rise in status that minorities have enjoyed over the past few decades, culminating in the election of a black man to the highest office in the land, good, old-fashioned white people are still the backbone of this country -- the "real" Americans. No, Romney isn't denigrating black and brown people -- not directly -- he's simply and subtly letting it be known to those who need to hear it that when he talks about restoring our country, he means going back to a 1950s, Pleasantville vision of America -- a time before, well, everything became so darned complicated and less "pleasant" because minorities suddenly seemed to be a powerful cultural and political force throughout the nation.

For the very specific audience Romney is attempting to appeal to in the "Promise of America" ad, there's an original sin to blame for the tumultuous times our country has been forced to endure recently, one that wasn't a singular event but has instead played out over several decades. That sin: change -- progress. Specifically the loss of influence by the people who had traditionally been in control of the nation and who could rest comfortably in the privilege bequeathed to them by God and the founders -- coincidentally, people who looked very much like the smiling faces featured in the Romney ad.

Romney has made it clear right off the bat: He's reaching out to white America.

And that makes it clearer than ever just what the choice is going to be this November.

The White Knight Rises

My latest piece for the Daily Banter is now up. It centers around the brand new two-and-a-half minute campaign ad touting Mitt Romney's vision for America -- and judging by the spot, that vision is very, very white.

Here's the opening shot:

"The important thing to keep in mind as you watch Mitt Romney's brand new campaign ad -- the one that officially kicks off his general election push for the White House -- is that everything you're seeing, and not seeing, is intentional. We've witnessed some pretty impressive missteps and gaffes from the Romney camp over the last several months, but make no mistake: The advertising of a presidential candidate is a tightly choreographed piece of theater where nothing is done spur-of-the-moment and nothing is left to chance. Penetrating the psychology of your target audience is too important -- that audience is always shown exactly and only what the campaign and its promotional team want it to see..."

Read the Rest Here

Quote of the Primary Season

This comment from Shep is one for the ages.

Water Foul

Last week, Newt Gingrich bounced a $500 check to the state of Utah's elections office. Now -- well, there's this:

"While at the (St. Louis) Zoo on Friday -- before his address to the National Rifle Association convention -- (Gingrich) was nipped by a Magellanic penguin, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Monday."

Even penguins hate this guy. I swear, I'm really gonna miss the Republican Clown Car Primary now that it's been narrowed down to just one clown. It's been comedy fucking gold.

Quote of the Day

"My first advice is to listen to reason when they formulate their positions. Reason never harmed a presidential candidate. My other advice is to check their watches from time to time: it is 2012, not the mid-1970s."

-- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev responding to Mitt Romney's claim that Russia is the United States' "number one geopolitical foe"

While it's true that Russia shouldn't be regarded as our BFF, Mitt's characterization of a country that's nominally an ally is stupid, needlessly alarmist, and nothing more than another attempt to take a shot at President Obama -- at all costs.

As for Medvedev saying that "reason never harmed a presidential candidate," he obviously hasn't been paying attention to this country's Republican party lately.

Rom-Com

This thing wins the internet for today.

Of all the candidates in the GOP clown car this election year, Romney is, maybe a little surprisingly, the one most ripe for continuous mockery. He doesn't just say insane things or make foot-in-mouth gaffes -- he is a genuine freaking weirdo. I can imagine him being the first generation of cybernetic android made by the Weyland or Tyrell corporations -- the one that only managed to convince, coincidentally, one percent of the public that it was a real person during market trials and which would eventually be scrapped in favor of newer generations of synthetics which featured enhanced human emotion chips.

For the Record

Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones spells it out, for those on the left still choosing to be pissy and obstinate:

"And yet, there's still.....the entire rest of his record. After all, Obama deserves to be judged by ordinary human standards, not by standards of perfection. A sidebar to Paul's piece lists Obama's top 50 accomplishments, and I think it was mistake to create a list so long. It ends up looking like the usual boring laundry list that any president can trumpet. Better to pare it down to ten really top accomplishments in order to highlight how many truly major accomplishments Obama has been responsible for. So I did. Except I couldn't get there. I cut it down to 13 and got stuck. Here they are, in the same order as the original WaMo list:

1. Passed Health Care Reform

2. Passed the Stimulus

3. Passed Wall Street Reform

4. Ended the War in Iraq

6. Eliminated Osama bin laden

7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry

9. Repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

12. Reversed Bush Torture Policies

14. Kicked Banks Out of Federal Student Loan Program

16. Boosted Fuel Efficiency Standards

18. Passed Mini Stimuli (July 22, 2010; December 17, 2010; December 23, 2011)

22. Created Conditions to Begin Closing Dirtiest Power Plants

27. Achieved New START Treaty

These are all big deals. Big fucking deals, to quote our vice president. Unless you're just bound and determined to sulk in your tent while insisting that healthcare was a sellout and the stimulus was too small and Dodd-Frank was feeble and the mini stimuli were more like micro stimuli, there's just no way around the fact that this is a historically colossal set of progressive accomplishments, especially in the face of a historically hostile political environment."

Now compare that list against anything you'd get from any of the current crop of sociopathic, war-on-women-waging, hyper-religious, red-meat pandering clowns running for president as a Republican. I'm not gonna let up on this, folks: You have to consider political reality because in the end that's the wall you come up against. You get this president or you get one of them. And if you've got even three brain cells in your head, the choice is immaculately clear.

Any other arguments are a waste.

Mother Jones: Barack Obama's Had a Pretty Damn Good Presidency/3.11.12

Quote of the Day

"We can be poor in spirit, and I don’t even consider myself wealthy, which is an interesting thing."

-- Ann Romney, wife of obscenely wealthy Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and driver of "a couple of Cadillacs"

You know, I was looking for an excuse to link to something running over at Cracked right now and damn if Ann "I'm Not Wealthy" Romney didn't just hand it to me on an appropriately silver platter. I don't normally troll Cracked looking for insightful political commentary, but a piece called "6 Things Rich People Need To Stop Saying" flawlessly dissects the tone-deafness so many of the indignant wealthy have displayed over the past couple of years of widespread economic despair. It also shreds their supposed rationale for regularly trotting out such horseshit arguments.

For the record, Ann Romney's quote falls under number one on the list.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"He's like a character in a Bruce Willis movie. He just knows how to stay alive. He's running through the jungle, fighting back, shooting from the hip, takes a lot of hits, stays angry the entire time, and he is giving a voice to a lot of people out there whose lives have been completely upended."

-- Tom Brokaw on Rick Santorum, during MSNBC's coverage of the Republican primaries last night

Where to even being. It's this kind of nonsense that frustrates the hell out of anyone looking for intelligent, responsible political reportage and analysis on cable news. No, Tom, Santorum isn't like a character in a movie, nor is he a horse in a race; he's very real and his rhetoric and proposed policies have the potential to impact the entire country. And the people he's largely giving a voice to -- the ones whose lives have been "upended," mostly by the frightening march of progress -- are those who believe that we need to return to the 19th century when it comes to our politics and pervading beliefs on subjects like religion and women's rights. He says the separation of church and state makes him sick, that a college education is for snobs and those willing to be indoctrinated by liberal thinking, and that Satan, the father of lies, is behind this country's troubles. But instead of parsing the policies and views of a man running for President of the United States and the way they could affect each and every one of us, Brokaw can only sit back and marvel at Santorum's supposedly ferocious tenacity.

This is why no one with a mildly functional brain gives a shit about anything the TV news networks have to say about politics anymore.

Yeah, Tom -- Santorum is like a character in a Bruce Willis movie. He's Brad Pitt's delusional mental patient Jeffrey Goines from 12 Monkeys. And if you don't have the balls to at least notice that because you're too busy clinging to some horseshit illusion of objectivity, then no one should be listening to you.

The Choice Is Yours

I want to post one more excerpt from Jonathan Chait's impressive piece in New York Magazine on the "GOPacalypse" -- what 2012 means to the Republican party in its current incarnation and why the right is casting the coming election in such stark, portentous terms.

I'm not sure it's ever been laid out more clearly just what's at stake this coming November.

"The Republicans have gained the House and stand poised to win control of the Senate. If they can claw out a presidential win and hold on to Congress, they will have a glorious two-year window to restore the America they knew and loved, to lock in transformational change, or at least to wrench the status quo so far rightward that it will take Democrats a generation to wrench it back. The cost of any foregone legislative compromises on health care or the deficit would be trivial compared to the enormous gains available to a party in control of all three federal branches.

On the other hand, if they lose their bid to unseat Obama, they will have mortgaged their future for nothing at all. And over the last several months, it has appeared increasingly likely that the party’s great all-or-nothing bet may land, ultimately, on nothing. In which case, the Republicans will have turned an unfavorable outlook into a truly bleak one in a fit of panic. The deepest effect of Obama’s election upon the Republicans’ psyche has been to make them truly fear, for the first time since before Ronald Reagan, that the future is against them."

So that's it. That's why your vote is so important. Why you can't sit this one out just because the current president hasn't given you everything you wanted. I talk a lot about the acceptance of political reality and get a lot of push-back for doing so, but a fact is a fact; you can try to avoid it all you want, but the bottom line is always what things really come down to. And the bottom line in this case is that if you don't have Barack Obama in office, flawed though he may be at times, you will have Mitt Romney, or Rick Santorum, or Newt Gingrich. Complain all you want, but those are your only choices for who will run the country next -- for who will, as Chait explains, likely set the tone for years to come.

Barack Obama will be President of the United States in January of 2013 -- or one of the current Republican candidates will, and he will be someone who's already professed or at least pandered to the panicked notion that we need to save America by restoring the proud traditions of a past that's no longer a viable option for us nor should it be.

That is your choice. And it's no choice at all.

Quotes of the Day

"President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob."

"Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands. There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor... That’s why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."

"I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely. The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country."

"We have some real problems at our college campuses with political correctness, with an ideology that is forced upon people who, you know, who may not agree with the politically correct left doctrine. And one of the things that I’ve spoken out on and will continue to speak out is to make sure that conservative and more mainstream, common-sense conservative and principles that have made this country great are reflected in our college courses and with college professors. And at many, many, and I would argue most institutions in this country, that simply isn’t the case."

"62% of kids who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it."

All of this was said by Rick Santorum over a weekend which saw the Republican party's highest-profile lunatic zealot -- at least currently -- going off the rails in a way he never has before (and that's really saying something). Never mind the ongoing -- though possibly most blatant yet -- demonization of intellectualism. Never mind how irresponsible that kind of rhetoric is at a time when the rest of the world is, as the Washington Post points out, "churning out engineers and scientists at a faster and faster rate." Never mind that Santorum's statistics on faith and a college education were apparently pulled out of his ass, as was another reference he made this weekend to a speech on religion and politics, supposedly from JFK, that never actually happened. Also never mind the overall admission that once a person becomes intellectually enlightened, he or she generally abandons ridiculous religious superstition and ass-backward conservative politics -- that a keen and educated mind is naturally antithetical to a right-wing viewpoint.

No, what's important is what all of this kind of public saber-rattling adds up to and underscores. It expresses the sheer terror coming from the right these days that, as I've said quite a bit recently here and on the podcast, its current political model is dying. What we're witnessing are the ugly death spasms of the incarnation of conservatism that's existed for decades.

Lo and behold, Jonathan Chait spells it out almost exactly as Bob and I have -- albeit more eloquently -- in a new piece for New York Magazine:

"The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams. But this is not one of them. To be sure, the apocalyptic ideological analysis—that 'freedom' is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care—is pure crazy. But the panicked strategic analysis, and the sense of urgency it gives rise to, is actually quite sound. The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency...

Today, cosmopolitan liberals may still feel like an embattled sect—they certainly describe their political fights in those terms—but time has transformed their rump minority into a collective majority. As conservative strategists will tell you, there are now more of 'them' than 'us.' What’s more, the disparity will continue to grow indefinitely. Obama actually lost the over-45-year-old vote in 2008, gaining his entire victory margin from younger voters—more racially diverse, better educated, less religious, and more socially and economically liberal. Portents of this future were surely rendered all the more vivid by the startling reality that the man presiding over the new majority just happened to be, himself, young, urban, hip, and black. When jubilant supporters of Obama gathered in Grant Park on Election Night in 2008, Republicans saw a glimpse of their own political mortality. And a galvanizing picture of just what their new rulers would look like."

Santorum's insane rants are exactly what they sound like: a desperate call to arms for a fading way of thinking. In one weekend, he summed up perfectly what the Republicans have been about for years -- and displayed in unequivocal terms why their time is up.

Their audience is simply disappearing.

Tree Hugger

Romney really is incapable of straying off-script.

Either that or he's succumbed to an outdated belief that every audience he speaks to is hearing his routine for the first time -- as if every form of media hasn't been broadcasting every word that comes out of his mouth to the masses 24/7.

Or maybe he just thinks he's like a comedian or musician and figures that each new audience is expecting to see him perform his greatest hits and will leave disappointed if he doesn't.

Oh yeah, and his wife drives a couple of Cadillacs. He's just your average guy.

American Exceptionalism

Shameless hypocrisy and an almost sociopathic unwillingness to base arguments on empirical evidence is nothing new for the modern GOP. But a piece in Slate right now by Eliot Spitzer highlights an interesting irony to the constant, panicked claims from the clown car of Republican presidential candidates that Barack Obama is taking us down the road to the "European-style socialism" he so admires.

See, there are two models currently on display for all to see which demonstrate two diametrically opposed ways of dealing with an economy gang-raped by Wall Street and its overseas ilk. In one, austerity is used to choke the people and their governmental systems to death, resulting in civil unrest and not a positive thing on the balance sheet to show for it; in the other, tempered bailouts and managed reconstruction is combined with a renewed emphasis on sensible regulation, resulting in a steadily increasing rebound and a drop in unemployment. The Republicans have lined up squarely, intransigently behind the former model; Obama, the latter.

Here's the thing, though: The place where that first response is being attempted, and where it's failing miserably, is Europe. The place where the second response is being used, to quite a bit of success, is Detroit.

So who's really being anti-American?

Slate: Why Romney Is Collapsing/2.21.12

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"What’s the George Costanza line? ‘When they're applauding, you sit down’?"

-- Mitt Romney at last night's CNN Republican presidential debate

No, the line is actually from Jerry directed at George and it goes, "Showmanship, George. When you hit that high note you say goodnight and walk off." (It's the same episode in which Puddy utters the famous line, "You stole my Jesus fish!" and which also has Kramer and Mickey acting out diseases for med students and Jerry trying to figure out what his new girlfriend's "tractor story" is.)

The best response to Romney's failed stab at a completely untimely pop culture reference came from Vanity Fair, which said that "household appliance" Romney "took a new HUMAN CULTURE (ca. 1990 A.D.) cartridge out for a spin," but may have purchased some second-tier software.

Elephant Shit

I'll admit it: I turned on the umpteenth Republican debate on CNN last night. Sat down on the couch to watch it and everything. I managed to make it all of maybe two or three minutes before actually saying out loud to myself, "Why the hell am I watching this?" then shutting it off to go do something meaningful with my time. Word has it I missed an epic barn-burner of bald-faced lies, shameless pandering and frenzied fear-mongering when it comes to the end-of-America threat posed by our socialist Kenyan, secret Muslim Manchurian ursurper president, Barack Hussein Obama, but honestly I was expecting nothing less -- which is why I shut the thing off in the first place.

Thankfully, Bill Maher watched it all the way through and put together some choice thoughts on it for the Huffington Post.

Here are just a couple:

"Isn't a highlight of every debate when Mitt Romney takes umbrage at being accused of the best thing he ever did in his life -- Romneycare? Something he should be proud of? Last night he took out his dueling glove and declared that when he was governor, he made sure there was NO requirement from the church to provide morning after pills for rape victims. They will be punished with a baby, as Jesus would want. Mitt's attitude is always, 'How dare you accuse me of helping people or being compassionate! Why, I'll have you know I'm every bit as much of a cold hearted bastard as any of these other pricks up here with me!'

'But Mitt, we have a picture of you giving money to a homeless person.'

'I did NOT give a bum money! I was paying him to blow me!'"

And this one echoes what I've been saying here quite a bit over the past week:

"People get mad at me for using the phrase 'this stupid country', which I sometimes do -- but, I'm sorry -- Satan? In 2012? This elephant is not only in the room at the debates, but everywhere on TV today where people were talking about this and not breaking down in the middle and screaming, Wait a minute -- We're modern people, surely we don't give any credence to this comic book character that was created in the bronze age!! It's barely worthy of a children's story, and people take it to the Oval Office -- Bush did -- and it affects their thinking and our lives. Why is Santorum so against contraception? Because there's a line in Genesis about not spilling your seed. A random brainfart from some desert dweller 3,000 years ago, before people knew about germs or atoms or round planets, and it gets written down and passed down and in 2012 people like Rick Santorum are still too R-word to see that, and that's why some woman in Akron, Ohio might not get birth control."

Make no mistake: Anyone who utters the word Satan in the year 2012 in a serious context not only shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the White House, he or she should be confined to a padded room somewhere and given a steady diet of Lithium and a round-the-clock rotation of psychiatric professionals.

President Brick

I don't mean to crib this directly from Cesca, but it's so damn funny it just deserves to be seen far and wide.

As one commenter on YouTube writes, "Empathy protocol malfunctioning. ABORT! ABORT!"

Quote of the Day

"You can't put a gun rack in a Volt."

-- Newt Gingrich, opining on Chevrolet's new Volt electric car in front of an audience in Georgia

I swear, these people couldn't be more of a punchline if they were actually wearing clown costumes. By all means, keep tossing out that red meat -- it's working brilliantly.

Tweet(s) of the Day

New York Daily News: Megadeth's Dave Mustaine Backs Santorum/2.15.12

Tweet of the Day