Libya Crisis; Big Mitt Fail

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I understand at least 50 Marines are on their way to Libya to provide additional security for the U.S. Embassy. It always worries me to read that U.S. troops are being sent anywhere; I hope the situation doesn’t escalate.

This brings us to Mittens, who politicized events in Libya even as they were unfolding. Here is a timeline of who said what, and when.

Although I am sure there are righties defending Mitt, others usually in his corner are distancing themselves. Other Republicans are issuing statements condemning the attacks but not mentioning President Obama. Steve Benen writes,

Mark Halperin, a barometer of the political establishment’s attitudes, called this the “most craven” and “ill-advised move” of the 2012 campaign.

It’s just remarkable to see Romney unravel like this. Within hours of learning that a respected U.S. ambassador had been killed by a violent mob overseas, the Republican’s first instinct was to launch a partisan campaign attack against the president. It came after a dishonest smear of the president last night — on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, when Romney said he’d refrain from such attacks.

The nine-minute clip is well worth your time. Just two minutes in, Romney condemned messages from officials under attack in the U.S. embassy in Cairo, falsely accusing them “apologizing for our values.”

Romney noted that the White House distanced itself from the same messages, which only made this morning’s statement that much more misguided — Romney was, simultaneously, saying the White House is wrong, the White House is right, and the White House is sending “mixed signals.”

This is the video Steve Benen is referring to:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

You hear Mittens getting basic facts wrong; he still thinks that the Embassy’s original statement came after the attack on the embassy, and not before. And it’s a real hoot to hear Mittens criticize the Obama Administration on foreign policy, after one of Mitt’s adviser’s called foreign policy a “distraction.”

Howard Kurtz is signalling Mittens to zip his lip.

By slamming the Obama administration as the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed in Libya, the Republican nominee has given the appearance of exploiting an international tragedy. Whether his criticism is warranted or not, the timing seems insensitive—as if Romney is more interested in scoring political points than mourning the deaths of U.S. diplomats.

Ya think? I say this is going to wound Mitt’s campaign.

See also Steve Konarcki, “Mitt’s Shameful Libya Statement“; Josh Marshall, “When You Learn They’re Not Ready“; James Fallows, “Three Quick Points on the Libya Killings.”

One more thing — I’m seeing a lot of sentiment that we must stand up for the right of free speech, which I assume means the ignorant yahoos who made the video defaming Mohammad are above criticism. Well, they certainly are above arrest. They didn’t do anything illegal. Whatever it was they produced should not be subject to censorship by the government.

However, freedom of speech doesn’t include a freedom from criticism. I would like to exercise my free speech rights by speaking my mind, except that there are no words for now disgusted I am with the filmmaker-flamethrowers. They should be ashamed.

The 9/11 Truth the Truthers Helped to Hide

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Must. Read. Kurt Eichenwald, “The Deafness Before the Storm.”

Executive summary: In the spring and summer of 2001, the Bush Administration was given a lot more intelligence about bin Laden’s pending terrorist attack than has been brought to public attention so far. The infamous August 6 “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” brief we do know about was only one of a string of briefs that provided much more intelligence about bin Laden’s intentions. The Bushies ignored this largely because the neocons who had taken over the Pentagon believed that bin Laden was trying to create a diversion from the real evil being concocted by Saddam Hussein. Seriously. Middle East experts who tried to explain that it was absurd to think that fundamentalist bin Laden and secularist Hussein were in cahoots were simply ignored. Although the Bushies did not know the time, place, and specific targets of the pending attack, it’s not unreasonable to think that if they had been on higher alert the 9/11 attacks could have been stopped.

I’m not going to excerpt the article because the whole thing needs to be read and digested. This ought to be bombshell stuff, although it probably won’t be. But I want to talk about the role of the truthers in shutting down inquiry into what the Bushies did, or didn’t do.

I began this blog in July 2002, after a number of news stories came out about how many warnings the Bush Administration had received about a pending terrorist attack. Even then there was much evidence the Bushies had been given a boatload of warnings from the retiring Clinton Administration and from U.S. intelligence that something huge and horrible was about to happen, and the Bushies ignored it.

Time went on, and George W. Bush was mythologized as the Rock of 9/11 who somehow deserved glory and honor for standing up to terrorists, even though he didn’t. I was frantic to have the events of 9/11 thoroughly investigated, and for the Bushies to be forced to answer basic what did they know, and when did they know it questions.

People may have forgotten how hard the Bushies fought to prevent the congressional hearings that eventually did happen, and that happened because some dedicated 9/11 widows didn’t give up. I thought the eventual 9/11 commission report was only a preliminary step, however. Unfortunately, political support for Bush prevented any follow up investigation, and the truthers helped the Bushies get away with this.

By Bush’s second term, the truthers and their ridiculous conspiracy theories had so muddied the waters that questioning how much Bush may have known before 9/11 branded one as an unserious crank. Liberals who told pollsters Bush knew about a pending terrorist attack before it happened were lumped into the same boat as people who still believe President Obama was born in Kenya. Van Jones was forced out of the Obama Administration because it came to light that in 2002 he had agitated for a congressional inquiry into 9/11 — you know, like the one that finally happened — and the Right rose up and called him a truther. Even to ask questions about how much the Bushies knew before 9/11 marked one as a lunatic.

Thus it was that truther craziness has stifled serious inquiry into what really happened on 9/11. This was something the late ALexander Cockburn, at least, saw clearly. I thought Cockburn was a crank himself, on many issues, but he’d been around the block enough times to have seen other wild-ass conspiracy theories create cover for the establishment and allow significant events to go uninvestigated.

I ran into a truther recently, on Facebook, who was still promoting the idea that one must either believe 9/11 was an “inside job,” the planes millions of people saw were really missiles, and that the World Trade Center towers fell because of a stealth controlled demolition job, or one must be a dupe accepting the “government version” of events. I really cannot abide truthers. I just hope I live long enough to see the whole story laid bare, in spite of the truthers.

A New Age of Liberalism?

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The Republican National Conventional appears to have turned voters off. That’s the result of a CNN/ORC poll that asked, “Does what you saw or read of the Republican National Convention in Tampa make you more likely or less likely to vote for Mitt Romney?” The “less likelies” were ahead of the “more likelies” by ten percentage points.

It’s too soon to know how much post-convention bounce went to President Obama, but all indicators so far point to some kind of bounce. And the Dems put more unapologetic liberalism on display at that convention than I have seen in a long, long time. Some rightie blogger wrote that it was the most liberal convention since McGovern’s, and he may have been right. Of course, I see that as a feature, not a bug.

Yes, the 1972 convention probably hurt McGovern more than it helped him, but that was 1972. This is 2012. A lot has changed in 40 years. Most notably, 1972 was the all-time peak year for real wages for working Americans; wages have been on a long, wavering decline ever since.

Since at least the late 1970s and 1980s Republicans have been pushing the snake oil of tax cuts, deregulation, and slashing “entitlements” as the cure-all for whatever ails the economy, and it seems to me that scam has about run its course. Even people who don’t follow politics all that closely are catching on, it appears. And after years of right-wing ideology dominating our nation’s political discourse, the Dems talked about citizenship, for pity’s sake, and it was a breath of fresh air.

At Daily Kos, Laurence Lewis wrote about the Republican death spiral.

The Republicans have no future. From climate change to national security to the economy to social justice and human rights, the list of issues on which the Democrats and public opinion are moving forward while the Republicans are stagnating if not attempting to move backward is endless. They can’t win on the issues. They can’t win on their freak show personalities. They can’t win using the principles of democracy and republic. The only hope for the Republicans is to lie, cheat and steal, and they are attempting exactly that. And to a party that now is habitually and congenitally opposed to basic scientific realities, lies aren’t incidental to their political strategies, they are in fact the basis of their world view. To a party that is openly bigoted against the diverse demographics that the rest of the nation not only celebrates but has become, voter suppression and the undermining of democracy isn’t but a political means to an ends, it is the inevitable desperation of the soon-to-be extinct. Their last and only hope is that they can buy a last election or two, and encode into law, and legislate from the bench into the Constitution an end to democracy itself.

This is right, which is why we cannot be complacent. The November election could still be close. A lot of states will remain snowed under by ultra-conservative legislatures and governors. A shrinking minority of right-wingers could very well keep progress in check for several years to come.

But the Buddha said — his last words, in fact — all compounded things will decay. It’s clear to me the wave of “movement conservatism” that picked up momentum from Goldwater and Reagan is now in its decaying phase, even as its takeover of the Republican Party is complete. Were it not for the media-“think tank” infrastructure keeping it alive, it probably would be gone already.

Now the Republican Party, which has bet all its chips on “movement conservatism” living forever, is in big trouble. It is being bankrolled by a small pool of mega-wealthy cranks and led by ideologues who cannot think, see, or feel outside of a very small box. And those two factors will prevent the GOP from adapting gracefully to a changing political ecosystem.

In short, we may soon see the dinosaurs die off and be replaced by scrappy little mammals.

Again, I don’t expect wingnutism to disappear in a puff of smoke the day after the November election. But by 2022, IMO, the GOP will have either shoved “movement conservatism” back to the fringe, or it will be dissolving into history to join the Whigs. And if one of those two things hasn’t happened, it will mean that today’s Republicans were successful in scuttling democracy itself.

Update: See also “For the Romney campaign, it’s forever 1980.”

Obama Pulling Away?

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Nate Silver says it appears the President is pulling further ahead of Romney in the polls. It’s not time to uncork the champagne bottles yet, but it’s looking hopeful. See also the BooMan.

The Right is genuinely baffled as to why their guy isn’t winning by a mile. Those of you with a morbid fascination with psycho-political pathology might get a kick out of some of their arguments today — see Power Tool John and Andrew McCarthy, for example. It’s beginning to dawn on them that they could lose. They are still hopeful that some reservoir of undecided voters will break to Romney at the last minute, but now they are entering the second-guessing phase. Have they been too “conservative,” or not “conservative” enough?

Although we may never solve the mystery of why Mitt Romney wants to be President, I am getting the impression that he, and much of the rest of the Right, thought this election would be easily winnable. All they had to do was present a candidate who looks like he could play a President on teevee, and all those folks disappointed in President Obama would flock to him. And it isn’t happening. And they are so lost inside their own echo chamber they have no idea why.

What I think is that the Democratic convention reflected what the electorate actually thinks and feels right now, and the Republicans missed that by a mile. The cut taxes/deregulate to create prosperity gag is old, and tired, and no one outside the rightie echo chamber believes it any more. And every local, state, and national candidate for office for the past several election cycles has been promising jobs, jobs, jobs, and the promises don’t cut it. Without a credible, clearly articulated plan, they might as well promise fairy dust and unicorns.

With two months to go a lot can happen, but I’m feeling pretty good about the election, and America, right now.

Did Mitt Get a Negative Bounce?

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According to the Princeton Election Consortium, Mitt actually got a negative bounce out of his convention. The data also show that the Bain/taxes attacks were hurting Romney, while the “you didn’t build that” blather hasn’t helped him.

Other polls also show that President Obama has widened a small lead over Romney.

Although I don’t want to be complacent about Obama’s election chances, I hope this means the Democratic message is resonating with people.

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.

State of the Election: The Confidence Game, the Bounce, and the Blitz

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The Confidence Game

Nate Silver has one of his usual clear-headed analyses of the two campaigns going forward — “A Referendum or a Choice?” Basically, Romney is running a referendum campaign on President Obama’s first term, and President Obama is running a choice campaign, challenging Americans to decide what America will be going forward.

As I’ve been saying this week, Romney seems to be marketing himself as the generic alternative to President Obama. This assumes voters are so disappointed by the President’s first term they will vote in just about anyone who seems suitable without asking many questions. Nate writes of the GOP convention,

Republicans spent some time trying to remedy Mr. Romney’s mediocre favorability ratings. The strong speech by Ann Romney, and the portions of Mr. Romney’s speech about his family, may have had a humanizing effect.

Even here, however, the intent seemed more to neutralize Mr. Romney’s perceived personal weaknesses — to make him an acceptable alternative under the referendum paradigm — than to offer an affirmative case for why Mr. Romney should be president under the choice paradigm.

Under this paradigm, it makes sense that the GOP is putting more energy into tearing the President down than in offering specifics about what a Romney Administration might do, because the pathetic fact is Romney doesn’t have much to offer in the way of the vision thing. He may have a vision, but it’s not one most Americans would like. Under this paradigm, the GOP wants America to think the President is alien and eeeevil and, you know, not white. But, hey, we’ve got this alternate candidate who has a pretty family and nice hair! So try him out! What could go wrong?

The President presents the election as a choice between two paths — we work together toward a better future or give the country back to the people who trashed it in the first place.

Obviously I think the second argument is more persuasive, but the electorate doesn’t always see things the way I do.

A confidence game is an attempt to defraud someone by first gaining their confidence. Essentially, Mitt needs to pull off a confidence game. To win, he has to persuade the electorate they can have confidence in him without letting them in on what he really intends to do.

This has been done before. Nate points to the 2000 election as a kind of choice-referendum tossup. Al Gore was a referendum candidate offering himself as the unexciting but responsible steward of the Clinton economy; and George W. Bush was a choice candidate, promising everyone tax cuts, free beer and a pony. And while the outcome of the election was not determined honestly, it has to be said that a very substantial minority voted for the pony.

The differences between then and now are that, first, then the electorate was complacent about the economy and possibly didn’t think the election outcome would make that much difference to it; and two, in 2000 the Right was tightly unified and totally dominated mass media to a larger degree than it does now. Plus the campaign journalists decided they didn’t like Al Gore, and it showed. So the narrative became that Dubya was a moderate and successful Texas governor and Al Gore was a space alien. But given everything going against him, Gore still won the popular vote.

Today the electorate is not complacent at all, the Democrats are unified while the Republicans are in a bit of a shambles, and while mass media still favors the Right, the Left is no longer completely shut out. Plus, the “choice” guy is likeable while the “referendum” guy is the space alien.

So, barring some unforeseen event that knocks the President off his game, IMO Romney has a much steeper hill to climb to win the election. And I don’t think just knocking down Obama alone is going to do the trick for him. He has to persuade voters they can trust him, that they can have confidence in him, and I doubt he’s got it in him to do that. I think voters are more on guard against being scammed than they were in 2000. And Mittens really is a space alien, you know.

The Bounce

Regarding bounces — there’s already a news story out saying that Obama isn’t getting a bounce. Ignore that; most of that polling took place before Big Bill spoke. We won’t know if the convention moved any numbers until next week. As Steve Kornacki said, if that convention didn’t create a bounce, no convention could create a bounce.

However, it’s possible there won’t be much of a bounce, because there appears to be only a tiny sliver of voters who are genuinely undecided.

But Romney needed a bounce more than Obama does. The electoral college scorecard has President Obama ahead. Romney needs to change more minds than Obama does.

The Blitz

The Romney campaign is launching a blitz of 15 new ads in eight swing states. The ads are targeted to both local and national issues. Here is the voice-over text to one ad:

“This president can ask us to be patient. This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault. But this president cannot tell us that you’re better off today than when he took office,” Romney says in the file footage.

Then the narrator kicks in: “Here in North Carolina, we’re not better off under President Obama. His economic and trade policies with China have destroyed thousands of jobs. The Romney plan? Stand up to China, reverse obama job-killing policies, create over 350,000 new jobs for North Carolina.”

I dunno. I think the part about standing up to China is weird, but whatever. What do you think?

More Buzz About Bill; or, R&R’s Empty Campaign

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Interesting observation from The American Conservative, where Daniel Larison admits that the case Clinton made against Romney and Ryan was devastating —

… it was all the more devastating because Romney and Ryan made no concerted effort to make the case for their ticket and their agenda last week. … Part of what made Clinton’s speech so devastating is that he compiled all of these objections, linked them together, and presented them to a large television audience all at once in a way that was easily digestible.

Another reason the speech was so devastating to them was that he gave the sort of speech that Ryanmaniacs might have once imagined that Ryan would deliver and the sort that some Romney supporters still imagine Romney is capable of giving. Romney-Ryan was supposed to be the presidential ticket of the “data-driven” manager and his budget wonk sidekick, and between the absence of any significant policy discussion last week and what happened tonight that has lost all credibility. Clinton outperformed both of them in terms of discussing policy details, and underscored just how meaningless the “campaign of ideas” phrase has been. Ryan fans had been convinced for over a year that the election had to be a contest over “big ideas,” and when it came time to engage in that contest their party leaders didn’t even try.

There are several possible reasons they didn’t even try. It might be that they do have a substantive argument for themselves tucked away somewhere, and they haven’t trotted it out because they think the electorate is bored with that detail stuff. I get that vibe from a lot of the Right, actually; they just want the red meat, not the wonky vegetables.

So instead, the GOP decided to package Romney as a swell guy who can be trusted to take care of things, and you don’t need to worry your pretty little head how he’s going to do it. That approach also assumes that people are so disappointed with Barack Obama that no one has to make a substantive pitch about why Romney would be better. They think the electorate is so desperate to find an alternative they’ll vote for anybody who has a nice family and looks good in a suit.

If that’s the case, IMO it’s a miscalculation. A lot of people probably would consider voting for someone else, but not necessarily ANYBODY else.

Or, maybe Romney and Ryan are saving the juicy details for the debates. They aren’t trotting them out beforehand because they don’t want to give the Dems time to craft counterarguments. In which case, maybe those arguments aren’t all that solid.

Another possibility is that they have a substantive argument, but they are keeping it hidden because they know most of the electorate would run away screaming if they knew what it was. (Along those lines, do read Tom Levenson, “Visions of the Apocalypse: Not in Fire, Nor in Ice, But in the Emptying Beds of a Nursing Home.”)

Or, maybe they don’t have a substantive argument, just a facsimile of one. Ryan’s budget possibly seemed brilliant to a lot of journalists who briefly looked at it — I assume it has, like, numbers and stuff — but the few knowledgeable people who actually studied the thing generally have been aghast at how flimsy it is. Krugman has been calling it a “fantasy.”

This takes us to two sets of sub-possibilities — I should be diagramming this — one, they honestly didn’t understand their calculations were hallucinatory; or two, they knew all along the calculations were hallucinatory and didn’t think anyone (but a few liberal wonks) would notice.

If we go with sub-possibility one — I can easily imagine that Ryan has such faith in his ideology that he didn’t think he had to make all the numbers crunch; his ideas are just so self-evidently true (to him). However, if he still thinks that, I don’t know why he would be shy about defending his ideas. Possibly someone recently got through to him that his grand ideas really are not defensible. Drag them out of the Fairy Castle of True Belief and they melt into a pathetic little puddle.

And, finally, maybe they’ve both been faking it. In which case the debates will be fun.

Update: Another possibility, from Ed Kilgore:

Larison’s analysis strengthens my growing belief that in choosing Ryan as a running-mate, Romney had zero intention of making a robust defense of the Ryan Budget or pursuing anything else the conservative movement was panting for him to say or do (other than the racially-tinged demagoguery about welfare). It was precisely the opposite: he figured he could shut up the noisy ideologues by offering them the symbolic prize of Ryan and then running his campaign in exactly the non-substantive way he always intended. This end-the-primaries strategy, as I’ve called it earlier, depended, of course, on swing-voter ignorance about Ryan and indeed the entire GOP agenda, and on Democratic complicity in a campaign about pre-set cartoon caricatures rather than anything that might look like an “idea.”

Plausible. And if that’s the case, it’s also plausible Romney will shift and allow Ryan more leeway to make a case for his ideas. But his ideas are nuts — see above about the Fairy Castle. And if that’s what Romney thought he got very bad advice from somebody (Karl Rove?).