Category Archives: Wingnuts Being Wingnuts

Sci-Fi PAC

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Today while clicking around the Web I ran into a “restore our future” ad for Mitt Romney. Restore Our Future is, in fact, a SuperPAC organized by a bunch of rich guys connected to Romney.

I just want to know what lamebrain came up with the title “restore our future.” It is illogical. “The future” cannot, in fact, be restored, because it hasn’t happened yet. The only way “restore our future” makes sense is in science fiction.

Of course, what it wants to mean is that the future is supposed to be a certain way, and “we” must put things right now so that “we” can have the future “we” are supposed to have. But (1) who is “we”? and (2) only a fool thinks that way. And how interesting is it that they Would come up with a slogan that uses the word “future” but is really about the past? Because you can’t “restore” anything that hasn’t already been.

Party Tonight!

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The virtual debate party begins here tonight at 8:30 eastern time, for the pre-debate warmup. BYOB. I’m taking suggestions for drinking games.

There are a number of articles out now that claim debates make no difference to elections, but Nate Silver’s analysis says that they often help the challenger. However, it could be argued that the post-debate spin was what made the difference, not the debate itself. For example, the numbers show that the Clinton-Dole debates in 1996 helped Dole just a little, and there’s no way. Dole was awful. I was embarrassed for him.

On the other hand, Nate’s numbers say that if the election were held today, Mitt’s chance of winning would be 2.7 percent. heh.

I’m not too worried about the spin. Why? Because righties are so out to lunch they couldn’t spin a dreidel on a turntable on a carousel. Right now they think they have a BOMBSHELL video of President Obama in 2007 telling an audience of black ministers that the federal government did not do enough to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Seriously. That’s their idea of a controversy. I guess we’re supposed to remember that Brownie did a heck of a job.

Righties say Obama’s remarks were racist because he ties the not-rebuilding of New Orleans to racial discrimination. Um, yeah, that was pretty obvious. Although I suppose it could be argued that it wasn’t so much racist as an attempt to finesse Katrina for political gain by making a Democratic governor look bad. And that the federal dollars eventually offered to New Orleans mostly went into the pockets of contractors with ties to the Republican Party and were not spent on, you know, rebuilding. And that was just good old-fashioned corruption. But it’s still not likely the Bushies would have played games like that if the neighborhoods that were destroyed were mostly white. I think anyone but a white racist can see that.

See also “Breaking: Obama Is Black” and “Right-wing Racial Panic.”

GOP: A Cult Looking for a Personality

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Billmon (yes! Billmon!) writes,

There simply is no getting around the fact that the mentality of the modern grassroots conservative movement is in almost all particulars the spitting image of a 20th century totalitarian political party–an “epistemically closed” loop of self-reference and self-delusion. In other words: a cult.

The upshot is that one of America’s two main political parties has managed to turn itself into the proverbial insane asylum run by the inmates. And, unless the doctors want a quick trip to the electroshock table, they damned well better tell the patients that they, too, can see the same pink elephants (wink) tapdancing on the walls:

I’ve been more or less saying movement conservatism is a cult of crazy since I started this blog more than ten years ago. However, I have only recently appreciated how much the Bush regime was able to control Teh Crazy even as they fed it and grew it. Back when the Bush cult of personality was at its peak, Dubya, Turd Blossom et al. were able make the GOP appear to be a normal political party, at least enough so that the media establishment politely looked the other way when Teh Crazy was showing, the way you do when your elderly uncle forgets to zip his fly.

A lot of the media are still doing that, of course, but not all of them. Not any more.

Dubya can’t, or won’t, play the role of Respected Elder Statesman, a role that Big Bill fills so very well. And nobody has taken his place as the Big Giant Head of the cult. Yes, many of them gave their love to Sarah Palin four years ago, but Palin needed a Karl Rove to channel and manage her to keep her cult of personality going. She lacks the smarts and discipline to do it herself (so did Dubya, but he did have a Karl Rove).

(Looking back, it’s a bit surprising Karl didn’t have somebody groomed and ready to step into the role of Trilby to his Svengali when Dubya stepped down. Maybe he didn’t fully appreciate the importance of the cult of personality to manage the masses, either. We may have Dick Cheney to thank for that, though. If Dubya had had a veep with any charisma at all, that person likely would be POTUS now.)

Anyway, now nobody is in charge, and there’s nobody telling Teh Crazy when to zip its fly and behave correctly in public. And the question is, can the toothpaste be persuaded to crawl back into the tube?

Jonathan Bernstein writes that some on the Right may be stoking Teh crazy for personal gain —

Many of us argue that there’s something really wrong with the current GOP. It’s not that it’s conservative; it’s that, well, to be blunt, it’s nuts. Or, to put it more gently, it’s that there are strong incentives for being dysfunctional, such as the profit motive for those who stand to make a lot of money from the party being out of office (when talk show ratings go up and wacky conspiracy theory books about Democratic presidents sell like hotcakes).

In other words, he’s saying feeding Teh Crazy has become an end in itself, instead of just a means of gaining and hanging on to political power. So Teh crazy continues to grow, but no one Big Giant Head is controlling it. And this is not sustainable. No compounded thing remains in stasis for long; it either grows or it decays.

The result is a party more hospitable to, say, Sarah Palin than to Richard Lugar. And a party which takes presidential candidates such as Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain at least somewhat seriously. That is, it’s a party which frequently ignores reality and rejects the normal compromises of the U.S. political system. And every candidate the GOP nominates either shares in the crazy or is hostage to it — which is what we’ve seen from Mitt Romney throughout the campaign.

Bernstein thinks the only thing that might save the Republican Party from self-annihilation would be a leader who could have their loyalty and who would then work to marginalize Teh Crazy. His example is the way President Eisenhower, working partly behind the scenes, marginalized Joe McCarthy. But now the GOP has been infested with countless Joe McCarthys, and I don’t see anyone of the stature of Eisenhower who could both gain their trust and call a halt to it. And McCarthy wasn’t being funded by a 1950s equivalent of Sheldon Adelson and supported by a vast network of think tanks and dedicated media outlets; he was pretty much a one-man show.

Further — if we go back to the McCarthy example, we see that McCarthy was supported by the Republican establishment until he became a political liability, and then they dumped him rather abruptly. And that was the end of his public career. At least part of the current Republican establishment seems to understand their party is out of control, and I bet they would like to tone it down if they could, but Teh Crazy isn’t listening to them any more.

The 20th century totalitarian political parties were eventually defeated, but it took war to do it. Watching Soviet soldiers loot one’s house can help one wake up to the reality that maybe the war isn’t going well, and maybe some political leaders had one snookered.

However, I am inclined to think that Teh Crazy will fade slowly rather than go down in a blaze of inglory. The question is, will the GOP itself survive? Can this party be saved? Or will it break up and go the way of the Whigs? The original Republican party was made up mostly of ex-Whigs plus a contingent of anti-slavery Democrats, I believe, so you could argue that the original GOP was something like the Reformed Whigs. I could see a coalition of moderate Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats challenging the crazy-infested GOP someday. I think that’s at least as likely to happen, eventually — not right away, but in four to six years, maybe — as the GOP coming back to its senses.

And have we reached peak wingnut yet? I didn’t think so back in 2008, when the peak wingnut theory was first kicked around, but now I think wingnuttism is pretty close to maxing out, short of armed and violent insurrection.

The President Is Getting Uppity Again

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Right now most of the rightie blogosphere is trembling in outrage because the President of the United States is not being properly deferential to Benjamin Netanyahu, and will be speaking with him only by phone and not in person. Apparently the First Holy Priority of American foreign policy is kissing Netanyahu’s ass.

The Weekly Standard is also upset that Reuters and AP took “shocking” photos of Bibi’s UN speech. It took me a few seconds to figure out what the “shock” was. Well, OK, he looks a little like he’s giving a Nazi salute.

But this is the photo everybody’s laughing at today. As far as I can tell, the only people publishing the “Nazi salute” photos are rightie bloggers expressing outrage about them. I haven’t seen them anywhere else but on right-wing blogs and rightie websites like the Weekly Standard and the Daily Caller.

And you know that if Reuters and AP sent out photos of President Obama doing a Nazi salute or whatever the equivalent would be in our culture, the Weekly Standard (plus every wingnut with a blog) would have it splashed all over its print and web editions. We’re all supposed to be more respectful of the Premier of Israel than of our own President.

Y’know, this really is getting tiresome. And the same allegedly American people pushing Israel Uber Alles (sorry, but that’s the truth) are perpetually harping on the rest of us because we are insufficiently patriotic. But what would please them? Should our flags and lapel pins display the stars and stripes or the Star of David? Y’all do sit down and work on that, and let us know, OK?

Nobody in U.S. politics that I’ve seen is anti-Israel, and I would join with the enormous majority of Americans wishing Israel peace and prosperity. But this business of putting the Premier of Israel, or the head of any other country, on a higher pedestal than the POTUS is, frankly, offensive.

In 2004 the Bush campaign took a statement by John Kerry and twisted it into a claim that Kerry would be taking foreign policy directions from other countries and would need permission from the international community to defend America. That was nonsense, of course. But now some of this same crew wants our Middle East policy to be dictated from Tel Aviv.

Clue: There’s a difference between being pro Israel, which I believe most Americans are, and being shills for Likud.

This obsequious pandering to Bibi may all be about getting the “Jewish vote,” but the last I heard, Jewish Americans overwhelmingly are supporting President Obama. So, dudes, if that’s your game, it ain’t workin’.

I can’t read President Obama’s mind, but if it’s true he’s being cool to Bibi it might be he’s signalling to Bibi to back off. No meddling in U.S. politics. No assuming we’ll dance to your tune. If so, this is entirely appropriate.

See also:

Netanyahu overplays his hand with Obama

Breaking Yom Kippur fast, American Jews talk Obama, Netanyahu

At UN, Netanyahu needs to repair his own power of deterrence

GOP Struggles with Math

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Yesterday Politico trotted out a polling analysis that says Romney is winning among middle-class families. They don’t define what they mean by “middle class,” but I notice the analysis makes a careful distinction between middle-class voters and middle-class families. Apparently Romney is losing with middle-class voters but winning with middle-class families; like the kids and dog count, I suppose. Or maybe they define “families” as “related white people who live together in the South somewhere.” The whole thing strikes me as an exercise in reassuring themselves they aren’t really losing.

Righties even have adopted what they are calling “unskewed” polling outcomes that show Romney winning handily. On the other hand, Sam Wang of Princeton Election Consortium is giving President Obama a 90 percent win probability. Nate Silver continues to give the President a comfortable lead in probable electoral votes.

Meanwhile, a small army of conservative number-crunchers are striving mightily to figure out a way to make Mitt Romney’s tax-and-deficit promises mathematically possible. So far, they haven’t been able to do it. See also “Checking Rove’s Math.”

Josh Marshall writes about why the GOP can’t, or won’t, adapt.

As recently as a couple weeks ago, the top generals in the Romney camp were stuck on the idea that Obama cannot win with unemployment this high. Can’t. And if evidence suggests otherwise, just give it time.

I’m reminded of this column which Byron York wrote on September 10th …

Mitt Romney and his top aides are running an essentially faith-based campaign. Whatever the polls say at the moment, whatever the pundits say, whatever some nervous Republicans say, Team Romney simply does not believe President Obama can win re-election in today’s terrible economy. The president may appear to be defying gravity now, but he can’t keep it up through Nov. 6.

Whether Romney could have done anything else if his team thought Plan A might not pan out I don’t know. But I think York was on to something here. Maybe not quite arrogance but a deep faith in an unproven hypothesis — enabled by a contemptuous disrespect for their opponent which blinded them to some of his assets as a candidate.

Perhaps they are blinded by his “blah”-ness.

Seriously, I’ve been saying for years that one symptom of whatever cognitive dysfunction is common to righties is a desperate need to believe that everyone but a small fringe of crazy liberals sees the world the way they do. You see something similar in white supremacists, who devoutly believe all other white people are white supremacists also but that a majority won’t admit it because it’s not “PC.” A rightie can no more admit that wingnuttery is not embraced by almost all Americans than the Pope could convert to Sikhism. That’s why, when they lose elections, the only possible (to them) reason must be voter fraud, or else voters were deceived by the Lamestream Media. So, it’s not surprising they simply cannot accept what is happening now in the campaigns.

Missing Video Found!

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Today the Right was making much of an apparent gap in the Mittens “parasite” video. The video is posted in full at Mother Jones (here is the transcript). But halfway through there is an apparent gap in the tape. This is noted in the transcript:

And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like. I mean, when you ask those people…we do all these polls—I find it amazing—we poll all these people, see where you stand on the polls, but 45 percent of the people will go with a Republican, and 48 or 4…

[Recording stops.]

Romney: …and about twice as much as China, not 10 times as much like it’s reported. And we have responsibility for the whole world. They’re only focused on one little area of the world, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, that’s it.

So, there is a snip missing, we are told of one or two minutes, but there is no credible claim [although lots of utterly ridiculous claims] that the rest of the video, in which Mitt goes on and on and on without interruption, has been tampered with.

Still, desperate people will grasp at straws, and William A. Jacobson is using the gap to argue that “Maybe Romney answer was “inelegant” only because Mother Jones didn’t disclose that part of tape was missing.” In other words, Jacobson appears to be arguing that whatever we’re not seeing was so elegant it would have neutralized the ugliness in the entire 40 something minutes of raw plutocratic elitism in the rest of the video.

And I’m thinking, wow, what could Mittens have been doing while the person making the recording was fumbling with his recorder? And now I know — this must be it.

As you can see, it is a huge departure from the rest of the video and does cast Romney in a different light, as well as make him look Swedish.

Jacobson is trying to say that the initial video clip was dishonest or taken out of context or something because David Corn didn’t disclose his initial post of four snips wasn’t the entire video, although seems to me it was obvious. And Jacobson obviously is in denial that it’s the entire video that is devastating to Romney, not just the “47 percent” part. And then Corn posted the entire video and transcript. So there’s no explanation for Jacobson’s raving except that he needs to be medicated.

Dick Cheney Is Jewish? Who Knew?

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Mo Dowd is catching flak from some quarters, including some quasi-progressive quarters, for writing an “antisemitic” column. Let’s take a look.

La Dowd wrote of some recent hawkish statements from Paul Ryan,

Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.

A moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a duty to invade and bomb Israel’s neighbors; a divine right to pre-emption — it’s all ominously familiar.

You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq — a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the shock of overwhelming force. How’s that going for us?

After 9/11, the neocons captured one Republican president who was naive about the world. Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice president, both jejeune about the world.

That’s pretty much how it looks from where I sit, too. But Jeffrey Goldberg wrote,

Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews. (Later, Hounshell wrote, “(A)mazing that apparently nobody sat her down and said, this is not OK.”)

So we can’t tell the truth about the necons because many of them are Jewish? Who writes these rules, anyway? Oh, right. Never mind.

I’m not sure I was consciously aware that Dan Senor was Jewish, but I looked him up, and it appears he is. I do remember that Jeffrey Goldberg was a major cheerleader for invading Iraq, however. He was beating the “Saddam is uniquely evil” drum for all he was worth in 2002. Bought the neocon lies hook, line, and sinker.

Goldberg may be consoling himself with the convenient lie that people who disagreed with him then and now are just antisemitic. Mr. Goldberg — stop being a schmendrik.

However, it does seem Dowd’s comments inadvertently struck a nerve. Ben Jacobs at Washington Monthly echoed some of Goldberg’s sentiments — “Dowd, in assailing neo-conservative influence in GOP foreign policy, veered dangerously close to anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish puppet masters.”

I’m sorry, but when somebody says “puppet masters” the first “trope” that pops into my head is an old Robert Heinlein novel about slugs from outer space that invade earth. I realize the metaphor has been used in anti-semitic speech, but it’s been used in lots of other speech as well and is too good a metaphor to retire because Some People want us to forget they helped get the United States into arguably the biggest foreign policy blunder of its history. Race, creed or ethnic heritage are irrelevant.

Nuts and Dolts

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Click only if you have the stomach — Mark Steyn responds to Sandra Fluke’s speech at the DNC with some misdirected verbiage suggesting that the oppression of women is necessary for the good of the economy.

Ann Romney wants you to know that reproductive and marital rights are not what this election is about, so you people had better stop asking her about it.

Ann Romney also wants you people to know that her husband is just oozing with goodness. No, Queen Ann, those are lies. Way different.

We now know that the Romney campaign is targeting eight states — Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and New Hampshire. Per Nate Silver, the only one of those currently leaning toward Romney is North Carolina. Jonathan Chait writes,

The reason this looks worrisome for Romney is that he’s pursuing an electoral-college strategy that requires him nearly to run the table of competitive states. The states where Romney is not competing (and which aren’t obviously Republican, either) add up to 247 electoral votes. The eight states where Romney is competing add up to a neat 100 electoral votes, of which Romney needs 79 and Obama just 23. If you play with the electoral possibilities, you can see that this would mean Obama could win with Florida alone or Ohio plus a small state or Virginia plus a couple small states, and so on.

Unless I’m missing something badly here, Romney needs either a significant national shift his way — possibly from the debates or some other news event — or else to hope that his advertising advantage is potent enough to move the dial in almost every swing state in which he’s competing.

IMO the targeting makes sense if you have been following Nate Silver’s data. Polling in most states is remarkably lopsided, heavily favoring one candidate over the other. Even if you had all the money in the world to burn, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to advertise in those solid red or blue states. In less than 60 days, barring some unforeseen event, no way the needle is going to move that much.

Viguerie: Romney Attempts Takeover of His Own Convention

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I get all kinds of bizarre stuff in my email inbox, but this communication from Richard Viguerie is in a class by itself. It begins:

Romney’s Agents Attempt Coup at GOP Convention

Manassas, Virginia — “Grassroots conservatives have launched an unprecedented rules fight against an attempted coup by Mitt Romney at this year’s Republican National Convention,” announced Richard Viguerie, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.

Ooo, sneaky Mittens. How dare the Republican nominee presumptive attempt a takeover of his own nominating convention? What is the world coming to?

Actually, what I’m hearing is that the Washington establishment is changing the convention rules on the fly so that they don’t have to seat potential troublemakers — e.g., Paulites and baggers — as delegates. Watch out for this.

Gullible and Gullibler

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Frank Bruni writes about gullibility in politics and says a few smart things.

… what’s most distinctive about the current presidential election and our political culture isn’t their negativity — though that’s plenty noteworthy and worrisome — but how unconditionally so many partisans back their side’s every edict, plaint and stratagem.

Of course, this same phenomenon has been striking in every election for the past 20 years, but thanks for catching on, Frank. Now, do keep up.

Bruni cites a film based on a true story that is, I admit, hard to believe. I don’t remember hearing about this at the time, but apparently some guy was getting his jollies by calling fast food joints, identifying himself as a police officer, and having one of the employees or a customer detained by the manager. And then the manager, instructed over the phone by “Officer Scott,” would unquestioningly put the detainee through a number of indignities, including a strip search followed by nude jumping jacks. In some cases the detainee was forced to perform sexual acts on someone else as part of the “investigation.” Here’s an article focusing on the particular incident that became the subject of the film, and it’s definitely off-the-wall. But, apparently, true. There are lawsuits and everything.

The point is that people are wired to follow authoritative leaders. Bruni writes,

People routinely buy into outlandish claims that calm particular anxieties, fill given needs or affirm preferred worldviews. Religions and wrinkle-cream purveyors alike depend on that. And someone like Todd Akin, the antihero of last week’s news, illustrates it to a T. The notion that a raped woman can miraculously foil and neutralize sperm is a good 10 times crazier than anything in “Compliance,” but it dovetails beautifully with his obvious wish — and the wishes of like-minded extremists — for an abortion prohibition with no exceptions. So he embraces it.

But then he says,

People also routinely elect trust over skepticism because it’s easier, more convenient. Saddam Hussein is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction; the climate isn’t changing; Barack Obama’s birth certificate is forged; Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years.

Wait a minute — one of these things is not like the others. Even Harry Reid admits he doesn’t know for a fact that Mittens didn’t pay taxes for ten years. I haven’t seen any polling saying that a significant number of people believe Mittens didn’t pay taxes. Most of us understand that the charge is meant to goad Mittens either into releasing his tax returns or digging in his heels to not release them and look guilty.

But you know Frank had to throw in an example of leftie gullibility to prove that “both sides are just as bad.” Because “both sides are just as bad” calms Frank’s particular anxieties, fill his given needs or affirms his preferred worldviews. If he had to fully admit that both sides are not just as bad, that one side has in fact gone way off the outrageous scale to an unprecedented degree, his worldviews would melt like Salvadore Dali’s clocks.

Frank continues —

To varying degrees, all of these were or are articles of faith, unverifiable or eventually knocked down.

Except for speculations about Mitt’s taxes, which still haven’t been released.

People nonetheless accepted them because the alternative meant confronting outright mendacity from otherwise respected authorities, trading the calm of certainty for the disquiet of doubt, or potentially hunkering down to the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things. Better simply to be told what’s what.

Yeah, we can’t expect an op-ed writer for a major metropolitan newspaper to do the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things, huh? Better just reflect what’s expected from him by his Villager peers.