Much virtual ink has been spilled in the past few days about Ron Paul’s leftier-than-thou credentials, especially regarding warfare. What does his campaign’s senior adviser, Doug Wead, have to say about all that?
Megyn Kelly: You know, one of the issues, obviously you know, that Congressman Paul’s most controversial on is his foreign policy stance, and in particular Israel and Iran, and whether he would allow Iran to get the bomb. He’s said he doesn’t want it, but he doesn’t want it because he’s worried that the United States will then go to war with Iran, and he doesn’t want that, just the same as he didn’t want the Iraq War, he thinks we’re too ... too prone to attacking other countries and to ... injecting ourselves militarily .... Newt Gingrich came out and said given that kind of attitude and policy stance, it would be a tough choice for Americans if the choice came down to Barack Obama versus Ron Paul, and Ron Paul is to the left of Barack Obama on certain issues, including foreign policy with respect to Iran. To those voters and to Newt Gingrich, what do you say?
Doug Wead: Yeah, yeah, I totally disagree with ... that idea he’s to the left or the right. He’s pro-Constitution. He’s in favor of taking the idea of war ... he’s not against war. He was the only public figure in 1981 to stand up and defend Israel’s right to defend herself and take out those Iraqi nuclear facilities. He’s not against war, he’s in favor of going to the US Congress as the Constitution says, debating it, committing to war, getting in, winning it, then getting out. He’s against these endless wars that just happen ... at a whim because somebody ... believes that someone’s a threat to the United States. If they’re a serious threat to the United States and/or our allies, then let’s take it to Congress, let’s discuss it, let’s commit, and let’s get in and win it and get out.
In this book, you’ll find out who stuck the cactus up Dr. Paul’s ass. He dispenses some tough love to the lazy people mucking it up for the rest of us. Dr. Paul explains the difference between “makers” and ”takers” and how being a maker is preferable unless you’re taking business risks or making babies. Tony Robbins credits this book with changing his life and writes a moving foreword. (Ha! “Moving foreword” cracks me up every time I read it.)
It’s the most wearying time of the year
There’ll be lots of eye-rolling
As purity trolling
Kicks into high geeeeaaaar
It’s the most wearying time of the year!
It’s the slap-happiest season of all
contradictions are height’ning
While sphincters are tight’ning
O’er a third-party braaaawwwwl
It’s the slap-happiest season of all!
There’ll be lots of infighting
And personal slighting
And commenters throwing their poo
There’ll be jokes about Nader
And ‘bout how Darth Vader
Was lesser of two evils too
It’s the most tedious time of the year
And it’s so damn depressing
With Tru-Proggies prefacing
“Leader” with “Deeeeaaaar”
It’s the most tedious time of the year!
There’ll be snark about ponies
And such sanctimoni-
-Ousness it’s like give me a break
Yes, we’re all disappointed
But fuck self-anointed
Saviors of the Left with a rake
It’s the emo-iest time of the year
When the difference ‘tween that
And the fucking of rats
Ain’t entirely cleeeeaaaar
It’s the emo-iest time
Whine about O-iest time
Jesus Christ, I hate this time
Of the yeeeeeeaaaaaar!
As LTMidnight pointed out in the comments to gil’s post down yonder, PUMA’s BAAAACK. Or something very like it. Because it worked out so well last time. HuffPo’s Sam Stein reports:
Huffington Post reader Andrew Rohrberger (via an Off The Bus submission) grabbed a copy of the audio of the “Run Hillary 2012” robocalls that are reportedly being made in an attempt to persuade the secretary of state to run for the White House.
The script leads one to believe we’d be living in a veritable utopia if only Clinton had won in 2008.
America would be better off today if Hillary Clinton was our president. The Wall Street robber barons would be jailed, young people could afford college and find jobs and six million homeowners wouldn’t face foreclosure. We need to change our course. Please sign our petition to draft Hillary Clinton for president.
Clinton’s not running, of course. And it’s remarkable to see that people are still holding out hope that she might change her mind. That said, the call represents an extreme version of the type of buyer’s remorse that Obama faces in the months ahead.
I can’t say I am surprised by any of this. President Obama’s support is tepid at best and among some demographic groups, nonexistent. If there was ever an election campaign ripe for a third party challenger, I believe 2012 is it.
If Hillary decides to jump in at the 11th hour, she will have my support and the support of my Blog.
The narrative that Obama is losing the base was debunked by a new CNN poll which found that support for the renomination of the president has tied an all-time high.
The CNN poll found that overall 81% of those surveyed thought that the Democratic Party should nominate Obama again. Only 18% of respondents thought that the Democratic Party should go with a different candidate.
Aided by comparison to the vastly unpopular Congress, Barack Obama has advanced to a 49 percent job approval rating in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll - his best showing since spring, and one that, if it holds, that may put his re-election prospects back within reach.
With electoral registration deadlines looming fast, the tension is all but palpable as we wait to see who will finally answer the call to primary Obama in 2012. That tension has only been tentatively relieved by the entry into the race of advertising manager and financial services consultant Darcy Richardson, from Florida.
You have to dig fairly deep in the media to find much coverage of Richardson’s announcement of his run in the New Hampshire Primary a couple of days ago—like the Boston Globe‘s “Political Intelligence” blog, that’s how deep. And he’s not even the headliner there, ranking behind some of the Republican entry:
“I wanted something out of the ordinary to do this winter,” said Linden Swift, an 81-year-old retiree from Indiana who failed in his effort to plan a vacation to Ireland. “It seemed like running for president was a good second choice.”
Although a registered Democrat and elected Montgomery County precinct committeeman at the time, Richardson was nominated to run for the position of Pennsylvania Auditor General in 1980 on the Philadelphia-based Consumer Party’s ballot line. In that race he finished third with 48,783 votes.
In 1988, the Consumer Party again nominated Richardson, this time to run for U.S. Senate. That same year, Richardson was the national campaign manager of former Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. McCarthy was also running on the Consumer Party ticket. Richardson was later a senior advisor to McCarthy’s final presidential campaign, in which he ran as a candidate in the Democratic primaries.
He’s a published author, and other sources reveal he’s not without that all-important media experience:
... Richardson has been quoted in major publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and has written numerous articles for a wide range of publications. He has also been a guest on several nationally-syndicated radio talk shows, ranging from the progressive “Thom Hartmann Show” to Joseph Farah’s conservative “WorldNetDaily Radioactive” program.
Although I’m a resident of Denver normally I wouldn’t bother to write about local issues, such as a school board race, as this is not a blog focused on any particular geographic location and frankly school board elections are pretty much snooooze newzzz. However one of the candidates for the Denver School Board in the current election, Emily Sirota, happens to be married to David Sirota. And on Friday he just put up a piece about the election at Salon titled “W enters my wife’s school board race”. Yes, “that” W.
He then goes on to conclude that local politics have been totally hijacked by large Republican, corporate interests and that his wife, just trying to run a little neighborhood campaign, is a victim of these nefarious forces. Well, if Sirota thinks this is worthy of a piece in Salon then I guess it should at least merit a reference at Rumproast, especially since I actually happen to reside in the school district in question, have four kids who’ve graduated from Denver Public Schools and follow DPS issues closely, and have known Sirota’s opponent, Anne Rowe, for years since our kids were in the same elementary school.
Therefore I consider myself uniquely qualified to fact check this pack of lies that Sirota attempts to pass off as some sort of responsible journalism. Which starts off with the title. George Bush has, in fact, nothing to do with the school board elections. He did happen to be in town the other day for a roundtable discussion on education but did not make any reference to the Sirota/Rowe race or the school board election in general.
Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy D.C. email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media.
Journolist 2.0 includes well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear. The list also includes a number of Occupy organizers, such as one of the Occupy Wall Street main organizers Kevin Zeese.
As John Cole observes, this news is as earthshattering as the fact that Breitbart himself is an opportunist maniacal asshole (I paraphrase):
Has anyone at Breitbart HQ watched so much of five minutes of Ratigan over the course of the last two years? Read any Taibbi? They aren’t secretly doing anything- Dylan Ratigan has been screaming about this stuff for years. Hell, Taibbi just publicly gave advice to #OWS.
I am shocked—SHOCKED, I tell you—to think that some in the media might help a protest movement to foment unrest. So are the commenters at Big Journalism, as you can see if you don your knee boots and gasmask and tread warily into the mire (and may I say, you look quite fetching in them, even on a Monday morning):
Petroglyph 14 hours ago
This is seditious and treasonous. There is no other definition which I can think of to describe people who have turned on America and wish to destroy it. They should be treated as such. We ARE under attack.
There’s much more like this over at the link, where the commie Ratigan and his ilk are taking a pasting:
Charm2 14 hours ago
Good work Big Jornalism! I look forward to seeing how the commie apparatchiks deal with this revelation.
Yes, a great upheaval has been upheaving right practically on the Polly metaphorical doorstep~a huge improvement from what happened on my actual doorstep every Saturday night when I lived in the Village~but any old hoo, here are pictures of it! I’ll be posting them in dribs and drabs as I recover from the clouds of earnestness that roll over Zucotti Park every time I go. All the manifold possibility in the air, the bright eyes of the idealistic youths~they so sap a snarky person’s energies.
Impure and hardened individual that I am, I’ve tried to compensate for my aversion to chanting “hey hey ho ho” by taking the kids clean socks and spare umbrellas. I don’t know if I’m warming Libertarian toes or sheltering Anarchists, but how else can one little Obot co-opt this burgeoning movement?
My sister and I use this wry couplet to deride a certain branch of our family tree that reacts to crises real and imagined with hair-pulling panic and hysteria. We don’t find it particularly helpful or effective. In fact, it frequently makes things worse.
Perhaps we’re related—by marriage—to the Carvilles of Louisiana. Former Bill Clinton campaign manager James Carville this week urged the president to respond to the daunting political challenges he faces by panicking. And firing people. An indicting others.
Recommending the freak-out strategy is something of a pattern with Carville. Hey, maybe it works for him. And it is nice to imagine that his neo-con shill wife is reaping her earthly reward via wedlock with an explosive anger-fetus.
But is Carville’s advice really sound, even when you analyze the more substantive points? Jason Linkins has a good rundown of why it’s really not here. Among his points is that if President Obama fires his appointed staff, he’ll transform the West Wing into a howling, tumbleweed-infested void since the Republicans have adopted the policy of refusing to approve any Obama administration appointment on general principles.
Carville advises the president to indict the Wall Street greedheads who brought our economy to its knees. And certainly the prospect of seeing those bastards frog-marched warms the cockles of my little socialist heart.
But there’s one leeetle problem with that: Thanks to the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act (signed by Carville’s former boss), the financial shenanigans that torpedoed our economy—while wildly imprudent scams—were for the most part legal.
Anyhoo, I’m confident Mr. Obama will continue to ignore Carville’s concern-trolling. As well he should.
I’m sure I don’t have to point out that there is something horrifically “off” about this picture—have you ever seen anything more awful than whatever it is? Please feel free to express your revulsion, because where to begin! I cannot. Even. Start.
TPM has a gallery of official White House photographer Pete Souza’s late summer pictures of the President interacting with citizens of every stripe—except that baby; how do we know that baby’s a citizen? Why didn’t anybody check that baby’s papers? Why didn’t the baby check the President’s papers? No, instead the baby slumbers, just like the American public.
(There is, actually, one shrieking plea for a caption contest, which if I’d any sense as a blogger, I’d have led with, but inasmuch as the Baggery contingent has help enough, I decided they didn’t need mine.If anybody can deduce which one and pre-emptively fill the snark-caption-vacuum with Roastiness, Mnmnt will appreciate, and Blingee it. Thnx.)
It’s easy to sell a $90 billion hit to the manufacturing and power industries when people are fed, housed and less worried about their jobs and retirement than they are about the distant statistical odds of ozone-caused lung disease. Sorry, that’s just the way it is.
You want President Palin? Have Obama go on live TV and announce that incremental improvements in air quality are more important than jobs and keeping energy costs down. I dare you.
Just when you thought Ralph Nader had run out of ways to deliver wins to the GOP, he unveils the Legion of Super Loonies:
Nader proposes to assemble a large group of Democratic candidates to take Obama to task on a variety of issues.
The press would ignore one lesser-known candidate, Nader told The Daily Caller, but an unorthodox “slate” of candidates would attract more attention.
“So you have to have several people of distinguished backgrounds — different distinguished backgrounds — run as a slate in various primaries so that he can’t ignore someone who has a military-foreign policy background, environmental background, poverty-labor background. See what I mean?” Nader explained.
Sounds like Ralph himself, Wes Clark (or a reasonable facsimile) and the Ghost of Joe Hill. But what about a Former-PUMA Hockey Mom Veteran Who Hates Fur and Has a Mortgage That’s Underwater? Or a Folk-Singing Boilermaker Who Quotes Korzybski and Can Prove That “America” is Just a Psycholinguistic Construct? I mean, in terms of Far-Left archetypes, Ralph is barely scratching the surface.
Sorry, I’ve been offline all day so I’ve no idea why Jane Hamsher’s being so snippy but reasonable in the clip above, but I’m sure it’s just a storm in a teacup.
What’s the takeaway from the speech schedule showdown and its resolution? Two narratives are emerging:
1) The president and/or his team got rolled, pathetically attempting a tough-guy maneuver and getting shown up as smarmy little sissies when forced to cave by a determined and/or crazy GOP.
2) The GOP proved once again that it is made up of bullies and psychopaths who engage in childish obstruction while America is a’swirl in the porcelain.
I’m not sure how to interpret it. The conventional wisdom is that the administration was obviously making a statement and shouldn’t have done so knowing that the House had ultimate control of the schedule. Maybe.
But it is a fact that something like this has never before happened in the history of the United States. For that reason, I’m a little reluctant to join the “he should have known” chorus.
You broke her heart, and now she hates you. She keyed your Audi and fried your vinyl album collection in Crisco. She got elected to your Borough Zoning Council just so she could tear down your privacy fence and have your driveway designated a “toll road.” She sent a confidential letter to your company’s HR department requesting clarification on corporate policy regarding homosexuality, gambling addictions and employee theft, and signed your name to it. Now she’s on Fox News shilling for a candidate who’ll burn you both, only Amy will be laughing as the flames consume her on a pile of your favorite Italian pullovers.
Then you’ll be sorry. And you’ll wish you’d been nicer, you selfish bastard.
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