With polls showing same-sex marriage not the hair-on-fire wedge issue it used to be, the GOP is cranking up the talking point that marriage is a state issue, not a federal one, and shouldn’t be an issue in the presidential campaign.
OK, geniuses, so what about the Defense of Marriage Act? Just last week, Republicans in the House voted to stop the Justice Department from using taxpayer funds to oppose DOMA.
And just last week, Romney Adviser Ed Gillespie said that Mittens supports a constitutional amendment that would strip states of the right to legalize same-sex marriage.
So which is it, righties? Hmmmmm?
Wingnuts do have a remarkable capacity for self-contradiction. See Frank Bruni:
I hesitated before picking on Bristol [Palin] because she’s an easy target. It’s like shooting moose from a helicopter flying low over the tundra.
But she so perfectly distills the double standards and audacity of so many of our country’s self-appointed moralists and supposed traditionalists: hypocrites whose own histories, along with any sense of shame, tumble out the window as soon as there’s a microphone to be seized or check to be cashed.
She proves that they’re not going away anytime soon — a new generation rises! — and that they haven’t been daunted by the ridicule justly heaped on Newt Gingrich during the Republican primaries, when he dared to cast himself as a religious conservative.
Certainly Rush thunders on. Last week he bellowed that Obama had decided to “lead a war†on traditional marriage. Seems to me Limbaugh started those hostilities long ago, if not with his first divorce then certainly with his second and third.
However, Bruni says there are people in the “uppermost ranks” of the Republican Party who don’t want the campaign to be about social issues. That nobody in the “grass roots” listens to those people has escaped Bruni’s notice. But we’ll see in the next few days if Mittens is listening to the “uppermost ranks” and backs off same sex marriage.
In the past few days whenever reporters have asked a prominent Republican about same-sex marriage, their comeback line usually is something about creating jobs. I wish someone had asked John Boehner how many jobs bills House Republicans have passed, or even sponsored, since taking over the House in 2010. I believe the answer is “zero.”
Mittens still wants to campaign on his record as a proved master of business and as a jobs creator. The Obama campaign is ready for that, too.
On top of that, Mittens had a terrible record on jobs while he was governor of Massachusetts. Mississippi may have beat the Bay State then; I’d have to look.
Weirdly, the GOP also is trying to charge the President with being too chummy with Wall Street. He’s not socialist enough for them?
Many of us would agree that Obama has been way too soft on the financial sector, and that money from the financial sector speaks way too loudly in both parties. But it’s hard to paint the financial sector as inherently evil when your nominee-presumptive is going around making excuses for the recent JP Morgan meltdown and saying that financial sector regulation would just “hamper” investment. It was just investors, not taxpayers, who lost money with JP Morgan, Mittens said.
Speaking of hampering investments, the New York Times says that investors are getting sour on investing.
Investors are shunning the stock market, and who can blame them? As serial bubbles have burst, faith in the market has been rewarded with shattered retirements. At the same time, trust has been destroyed by scandals and — as demonstrated by the reckless trading at JPMorgan Chase — the slow, uncertain pace of financial reform.
There has been less buying and selling of stock, and there have been huge outflows of investor dollars from domestic stock mutual funds, as detailed recently by The Times’s Nathaniel Popper. If the trend continues, the result could be a less robust market, with fewer companies opting to raise money by issuing shares and fewer investors willing to put their retirement savings into stocks.
Policy makers should pay attention. Evidence suggests that investors are not merely reacting to tough conditions, but rather are staying away because they do not trust the market. Restoring trust is crucial to restoring the market.
We’ll see if restoring consistency is crucial to a political party.
Restoring “trust” in the system?
We might go a long way towards doing that if, not only did we take away the gasoline and matches from the feckin’ arsonists, but maybe threw all them feckin’ arsonists in feckin’ jail!
Now THAT might bring back some trust!
Who wants to build something in a land filled with sociopathic arsonists and nihilists?
Especially if the arsonists and nihilists make even more money by gambling that they’re going to burn something to the ground?
Sheeeeeeesh!
And if it isn’t Jamie Dimon, telling everyone that regulations are bad after having his fine gambling establishment (the artist formerly known as “a bank”) lost $2 billion dollars in unregulated credit swap deals, then Bristol Palin is the new poster-child for cognitive dissonance.
A single, former teenage mother, now in her 20’s, still unmarried, and not on speaking terms with her ‘Baby Daddy,’ lecturing other people by writing about the importance of raising a child in the traditional man+woman marriages, and not in a same-sex marriages.*
Actually, they’d make quite a pair: Mr. & Mrs. Cognitive Dissonance.
How do you mock the absolutely un-mockable?
Bricks have more self-awareness than these two…
*And yes, I know that she didn’t write it. It was in standard English, and not in Pidgin Palinglish.
There are a lot of things I don’t understand that seem to make sense to other people–things like Schrodinger’s Cat and, senile through his second term, Ronald Reagan being the greatest, smartest President ever–but how could LESS Wall Street regulation possibly increase confidence in the financial market? Have the Masters of the Universe not thought this through, or do they simply not care?
And the other thing I don’t understand is why people who produce goods and services support austerity measures that reduce the number of people who can afford to spend money on goods and services.
Well, muldoon, Goebbels, who perfected the Big Lie Technique of propaganda based it on the principle that a lie if AUDACIOUS enough and REPEATED enough times, will be believed by the masses.
It worked for him as he convinced the German people that the sources of all the problems facing post-WWI Germany could be laid at the feet of Germany’s ethnic and national minorities – Jews, Poles, French – who were committed to destroying Germany. (Apparently he wasn’t overly comfortable with what the German people might do to him when his Big Lie was revealed to be just that, a Big Lie, because when Germany fell he killed his 6 young children, his wife and himself.)
Republicans believe that all their tax cuts for rich people are jobs bills. They think Paul Ryan’s budget is a jobs bill.
No, seriously. They actually have been asked why they haven’t passed any jobs bills, and that’s what they’ve said.
They don’t care about increasing OUR confidence IN the financial market; they care about the Masters of the Universe’s confidence that they will make money no matter what they do. The resulting firehose of cash will result in one or two jobs being created, mostly in the position of yacht-washer.
Because it means more tax cuts for them right now gimme gimme. They talk about “growing” their businesses, but that only applies up until they cash out and retire. Two minutes after that, they literally don’t care.
Stock traders are not investors, they are gamblers who should know by now that the house never loses. People are beginning to see that the market is just another place to store your money, and the place is full of thieves. Their talk of trust is so absurd.
This is why I’ve never believed that Mitt was going to tack to the center once he secured the nomination–his party won’t let him. Or I guess it’s the voters who won’t let him. They threw away Senate seats they could have had in 2010, and they haven’t moderated a damn thing in the interval. Apparently they’re still working on the idea that 2010 was a colossal victory for them, so they just need to keep doing what they’re doing.
“And the other thing I don’t understand is why people who produce goods and services support austerity measures that reduce the number of people who can afford to spend money on goods and services”
It doesn’t seem to make sense but I believe it is born of lust for profits and control. In the Libertarian wing-nut mind austerity will create a whole new batch of desperate workers willing to accept lower wages, little or no benefits, reduced workplace standards. Austerity will put pressure on politicians to rollback workplace, environmental, financial and all things regulatory. The middle class has not been a winner for the 1%, they need us surfs tattered and desperate, too busy scraping by to complain about little else. It sounds a little Orwellian but I believe this is what the republicant party is working towards, no unions, no pensions, no minimum wage, no regulations, no standards.
In reading my post I did not finish my point? The point is the Wal-Mart model. Lower cost on the front end allow you to sell inferior products for less, eliminate most of the competition and maximize wealth for only the upper tier executives and shareholders. Basically the republicants want to turn the United States workforce into China. Lower retail prices doesn’t mean lower profits if you can exploit a desperate workforce, Marvelous!
Restoring consistency? How inconvenient!
Remember; to an ideologue, hypocrisy is not a bug. It is not even a feature. To an ideologue, hypocrisy is the operating system.
Same-sex marriage is the wedge issue it always has been for the GOP. The poll numbers among the faithful hav not changed much. What HAS cbanged is the opinions of democrats (so what) and independents. (Big oops!) The independent voter is abandoning homophobia. Evangelicals won’t give up on this and will push Romney to take a position which will hurt him in the center.
Of course, this doesn’t rank high on a list of issues for independents, but character does. And homophobia is slimy.
Doug — sort of by definition, if an issue can’t be used to drive a wedge through one’s opponent’s base, it’s not a wedge issue.
There’s a bit more to the technique, actually. If you repeat a lie enough, and get enough people to agree that it’s reasonable, people start quibbling about the details.
If I say that a clear, blue sky is green, and enough people repeat it, people will say that, well, yeah, it did have a mildly greenish tinge to it. And with hardcore people insisting “green! Greengreengreen!” and other people admitting “well, maybe greenish tinged, opinions differ”, only the “shrill” will say “are you all out of your fucking *minds*? It’s *blue*.” Their very astonishment over the enormity of the lie will work against them… and how do you prepare an argument to support your case when you’re working from something so fundamentally incorrect from the getgo?
So it’s not just getting people to believe the big lie, it’s getting them to argue over the big lie, rather than just wholeheartedly rejecting it.