It’s becoming more apparent that the GOP’s drive to relive the 2008 Democratic primaries that we’ve noted before continues apace.
A popular rival candidate with wildly enthusiastic followers that bandy accusations of primary voting chicanery by the party Establishment to favor the Anointed One?
We have to spread the word of this vote fraud. It’s the best way to destroy Mitt & his candidacy & destroy the GOP establishment. The best way to accomplish this is to get all the “good ‘ol GOP” people pissed off & fighting the same fight. Yes, Ron Paul is the one who has been effected the most by vote theft…but, Santorum & Gingrich have also had votes stolen from them as proven by the charts. I posted this on Glenn Beck’s FB page…
“Santorum’s votes are being STOLEN!
Check.
Complaints that the candidate isn’t being properly envettened?
A visionless, rudderless, gaffe-prone presidency is the last thing that Republicans need right now. Having to defend Romney’s slips—he’s insulted 7-Eleven cookies, said he enjoys firing people, and announced he is not concerned about the very poor, and that’s just this year—will further contort the party’s soul. Four years of Romneyisms, all of which smack of elitism, will cement the image of the GOP as the out-of-touch party of the rich.
Better that the GOP remain in the political wilderness for another four years (and, hopefully, find itself) than have a Romney presidency prolong its intellectual and moral confusion.
Instead of linking to Newt Gingrich’s rambling farewell speech, in which he thanked many people, and um, said many things (including a digression on his lifetime achievements) and, um, didn’t really support Mitt Romney so much as state that any Republican was better than Obama (inspirational!), I think I’m just going to concentrate on Newton Leroy Gingrich’s real contribution to this campaign.
For one thing, there’s the negging he did earlier in the primary to make the Romney campaign really want to hook him up with support from their donor list to help in retiring his massive campaign debt. You know, like these comments right here:
And then there’s this marvelous and accurate statement from Fox News’ own honest fellow, Shep Smith, who comments on Gingrich’s parting words and Team Romney’s response to them:
“Politics is weird….and creepy, and now I know lacks even the loosest attachment to anything like reality.”
I would make that into a needlepoint to hang over my bed if I could do needlepoint, I tell you what.
This moment is bittersweet for me. I don’t think there’s much of a political future for Newt Gingrich and actually, I suspect that his campaign may have even harmed his reputation by calling attention to the rare batshit flavor of what has generally been assumed to be his scholarly, historical, and technological Big Ideas. Viewing him in the light of 2012 casts a pall over the earlier version that once loomed large in my political imagination—the 1994-1999 Gingrich whose Contract With America and whose leadership in the House led to such…nonsense. The government shutdown. The impeachment of President Clinton.
I don’t think you could blame me for seeing the echoes of that time in the 2010 mid-term elections that swept in a mess of GOP freshmen armed with hard-core partisan ideals, or for wondering if someone like Eric Cantor or (more probably) Paul Ryan might have Gingrich-like influence as Speaker themselves one day by following in his creative-destructive footsteps (no fear of Boehner—he’s useless). Yet seeing the curtain swept back on the Great and Powerful Oz to reveal a little con man is kind of satisfying, in a way. Did he give brains, a heart, courage, a home, to arch-conservatism? Or were they merely tokens?
In among the various fusses yesterday, you may have noticed a visit by POTUS to Afghanistan. BuzzFeed catalogues the behind-the-scenes moves by National Security Council Spokesman Tommy Vietor to maintain secrecy over the whereabouts of President Obama and his retinue after Afghanistan-based TOLONews prematurely tweeted that his plane had landed prior to 9.19 a.m.:
The TOLONews tweet was spotted by Huffington Post reporter Joshua Hersh, who wondered “Is this right?” setting in motion a frantic effort by the White House to keep word of Obama’s trip out of the press until he was out of harm’s way.
The story spread to the New York Post:
By 9:37, the New York Post had published an item on the trip based off the TOLONews tweet, and by 9:53 it was running in the ticker “Breaking News” at the top of its home page. By 10:06 the story was updated to add the “strong” White House denial and minutes later the breaking news alert was removed from the homepage. Sometime in the interim, the initial tweet from TOLONews was removed as well.
The efforts to spike the story until the president’s plane had indeed touched down at 2 p.m. were only partially successful, though most of the media cooperated, as they customarily do when presidential security is at stake. The New York Post couldn’t restrain itself from sniping after the event, though:
The White House informed the Post today the report on its website that President Obama was in Kabul was not accurate and that, in publishing it, the paper was endangering the President’s life. With due respect to the White House and out of an abundance of caution, the Post removed the story from its website. We are impressed the White House believes the Taliban, while hiding in caves and dodging American drones, are, like millions of others, avid readers of nypost.com.
Fate thus having been tempted, you can probably guess what comes next:
Meanwhile, there was one organ that didn’t play ball.
No klaxons and flashing lights, but throughout the day Drudge carried this headline, first linking to the changing Post story, then a similar story from a Chinese news agency:
“The TOLONews report was inaccurate,” Vietor said, “so it was 100 percent true and easy to tell people that. When people say ‘is he in transit’ that’s a different story.”
“The way this works is a small group of press are read into the fact of this trip ahead of time,” Vietor said.” “For operational security reasons it can’t be public until they land. There is a firm agreement between news agencies and the White House not to report until the plane is on the ground.”
Vietor said the arrangement with reporters is standard operation procedure, though news of the trip leaking four hours early is anything but.
Asked about The Drudge Report’s decision to keep swapping links, Vietor replied, “There is nothing you can do about Drudge.”
So there ya go: Drudge tried to kill the president.
The Romney campaign’s recent hire of Richard Grenell was met with a little controversy for a couple of reasons—for one, he had a bit of a mean sense of humor on Twitter (although that was easily deleted, if not entirely forgotten) and for another, he was openly gay. It looks like it was the latter detail that lead to Grenell’s resignation today, as Jennifer Rubin reports:
Richard Grenell, the openly gay spokesman recently hired to sharpen the foreign policy message of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has resigned in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives.
In a statement obtained by Right Turn, Grenell says:
I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.
According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign.
This is really quite disappointing. The last week or so has focused attention on Romney’s foreign policy views, and Grenell might have been able to, well, do the thing he was presumably hired for and help the campaign craft a consistent message if the social conservatives could actually bring themselves to view a person based on his merits, not his identity, and if the Romney campaign wasn’t—how should I put this?
Holy crap, this Obama guy! First he stone-cold orders the death of Osama bin Laden after Bush and Romney both said it was no big deal, and now he jets off to Afghanistan to wrap that clusterfuck up in a high-profile way. Who does he think he is? The president?
This little sub-Swift Boat hit piece from the UK’s Daily Mail is currently garnering reactions ranging from the hysterical to the measured in the US media and RW blogs:
Those of you who’ve read some of my earlier posts about the Daily Mail‘s role as a transatlantic “news” laundering operation will know that I’m hardly a disinterested party where its baleful influence on politics is concerned.
Lest you think I’ve gone unnecessarily ad hominem in kicking off this post by implying that Toby Harnden is some sort of cynical partisan hack, let’s take a look at Harnden’s own words on this subject back in July last year:
In Defense of Hacks
...
Whereas our American counterparts have long viewed themselves as comparable to lawyers and doctors, we British hacks still see ourselves as practitioners of a grubbing craft rather than members of an upstanding profession. (The public, which views us as on a par with real estate agents, prostitutes and perhaps even criminals, tends to agree.) As recently as the mid-1990s, it was standard practice for British reporters to spend three hours over a liquid lunch in the pub before returning to file their copy. Stories were sometimes pronounced “too good to check.” When seeking an additional element of confirmation on one story, I was told that it was “close enough for journalism” and that a bit of artful conjecture would do. An editor once dictated a quotation to me and then, winking, offered the opinion that he was sure my contacts were good enough to find someone to say it anonymously. My deadline was five minutes away.
...
While the American press has certainly had its share of similar disgraces, it is true that American newspaper articles are in the main more accurate and better-researched than British ones; the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal was not wrong when it ventured that Fleet Street has “long had a well-earned global reputation for the blind-quote, single-sourced story that may or may not be true.” But stories in the American press also tend to be tedious, overly long, and academic, written for the benefit of po-faced editors and Pulitzer panels rather than readers.
...
For all their faults, British “rags” are more vibrant, entertaining, opinionated, and competitive than American newspapers. We break more stories, upset more people, and have greater political impact. (The BBC, with its decidedly American outlook on the news, has become increasingly irrelevant as its state-sponsored dominance has been challenged by Murdoch’s Sky News.)
Looks like the wingnuts are all aflutter because, according to “family lore,” very, very white lady Elizabeth Warren may have some Native American ancestry, and Harvard and / or other educational institutions that employed the professor may have listed her as a minority in faculty directories.
I think this sort of thing happens more often than we think. I doubt very much Warren ever tried to benefit from Affirmative Action or organize a Trail of Tears reenactment as the more disreputable wingnut outlets are claiming.
However, as a pale, freckled white lady of English, Irish and Scandinavian stock who could pass for Warren’s kinswoman, I can attest that I grew up hearing rumors in my own family of a Native American great-great-grandmother, and that I took some pride and comfort in the thought that perhaps all my forebears didn’t appear to be carved out of cream cheese.*
Not that, aside from the need to seek shade during daylight hours, there’s anything wrong with being a pale and freckly WASP. But if you subtract being the beneficiary of hundreds of years of privilege, it’s kind of boring.
There’s no reason for me to believe that this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner will be as interesting as last year’s, what with President Obama’s digs at the billionaire birther Donald Trump after having released his birth certificate (the moneyed gent in question having made priceless faces of discontent), and with the events that followed being, well, what they were. This one doesn’t have the same narrative—but oh, well.
This whole Media Villager/Celebrity/Politician shmoozeapolooza makes me uncomfortable—and yet I must watch. So I’m following the stream on C-Span and Twitter. And, yes, self-loathing. Did I need to mention the self-loathing? Did you see LiLo and Kim Kardashian? OMG!
So, I guess what I’m saying is—if you’re also vicariously hitting the Nerd Prom hard and want to commiserate: I’m here for you and with you.
Those lovely delicate flowers are extremely deceptive because there is nothing delicate about bindweed. It is a horrible pest and I usually get sick of pulling it every day by August and just let it go, which no doubt compounds my problems with it.
I once sat through an hour long and very boring gardening show on the TeeVee because they kept tantalizing me with an upcoming segment that was going to give us the seekrit and fail-proof method of getting rid of bindweed. And their secret was (TA DA) PULL IT!! I kid you not.
Then a friend of mine once spent the whole day carefully painting each strand of bindweed in her perennial bed with weed killer then slipping a plastic baggie over it and securing it with a twist tie. And it worked! All the bindweed died! For about, oh, a month or so. And then it sprang from the earth as good as new. Bindweed is truly the honey badger of the plant world.
If you’ve got any ideas for getting rid of the stuff please share in comments. Otherwise consider this an open thread.
In many religions, when an iconic figure dies, it’s customary to commission works of art and music to celebrate their life and legacy. Over the centuries, this has produced some of the most sublime artworks known to humanity.
This is not such an occasion.
[h/t HumboldtBlue in the Rumper Room. Please direct any brickbats at him.]
Nope, I’m not dead. But I have been dealing with some old-ladyish health problems, even though I’m not really old. (And some churlish individuals might dispute my claim to being lady-like.)
Anyhoo, chicken update: I moved the critters to the coop. My kid had the genius idea of activating the record feature on her iPhone and propping it against the side of the coop to capture the half-grown chicks in action at their eye level:
They’re all pretty tame, and one flies up and sits on my arm like a parrot. What are you up to this weekend?
The Romney Campaign seemed to have walked straight out of the cold war era into a phone conference intended to stress Willard’s foreign policy creds. The results were, well, a little weird. Kinda like Willard come to think of it!
In comments that were eerily reminiscent of John McCain’s frequent gaffes in regards to Czechoslovakia, Romney’s surrogates warned of the “Soviet” threat and Obama’s failure to protect the free world:
Obama is “withdrawing from leading the free world in maintaining stability around the world,” Lehman said. “What Obama calls ‘leading from behind.’”
One of the worst examples, according to Lehman, is happening at the top of the world.
“We’re seeing the Soviets pushing into the Arctic with no response from us. In fact, the only response is to announce the early retirement of the last remaining icebreaker.”
Prosper warned Obama was abandoning America’s eastern European allies — some of which haven’t existed for decades.
“You know, Russia is another example where we give and Russia gets and we get nothing in return,” Prosper said. “The United States abandoned its missile defense sites in Poland and Czechoslovakia, yet Russia does nothing but obstruct us, or efforts in Iran and Syria.”
The conference call, which was apparently timed to rebut Veep Biden’s speech today touting Obama’s actual foreign policy successes, didn’t do a whole lot to increase my confidence in Willard’s potential foreign policy leadership. But no doubt Snowflake Snooki will be all over that push by the “Soviets” into the Arctic!
HuffPo relays a befuddled reaction from the Fox News crew to President Obama’s “slow jam” appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. It doesn’t sound like it won him Gretchen Carlson’s vote:
“Right now,” she began, “a bunch of former presidents are, like, ‘Huh? That’s what we do now when we’re president of the United States?’”
“When you want the kids,” said Doocy, referring to Obama’s appeal to young voters.
“I think it’s very effective for President Obama,” she remarked later. “I personally do not agree with the highest office of the land, the most important figure in the world going on these comedy shows. I think it lowers the status of the office.”
After all that Fox has said about the O-man over the past five years, lowering the status of the office is obviously a BIG no-no.
Given the way Mittens’ copycat campaign‘s shaping up, I look forward to him dueting with Lawrence Welk any day now.
This scares Fox and the wingnut blogs so much they find it “embarrassing”:
Last night, Mittens was widely acclaimed as having sewn up the GOP nomination, winning all five primaries at stake. Again, turnout was extremely unenthusiastic. Not that you’d have gathered this from some of the adulatory press coverage that’s greeted his “A Better America Begins Tonight” victory speech in New Hampshire.
Taegan Goddard at Politicalwire awarded him a cherished plaudit:
Quote of the Day
“Everywhere I go, Americans are tired of being tired.”
—Mitt Romney, quoted by the New York Times, in a victory speech to supporters after winning five primaries.
The line reminds me of the apocryphal story that has Bono standing onstage, clapping his hands slowly and intoning, “Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies,” only to be heckled: “Well, stop fucking doing it then!”
But like so much of the speech, if it sounds familiar—somewhat hopey and changey, in fact—you may have heard it before:
“Americans are tired of being tired,” Joe Biden said. “It’s clear that the American people have decided it’s time to get up. They’re tired of being told that we’re in a long, slow drift.”
What else you could hear of the speech (video after the fold—Teleprompters and all!) above Mittens’ hired bonehead chorus’s chanting in the closest approximation to enthusiasm money can buy was short on specifics and any tangible vision beyond reducing public employees to a level of penury to match that of the rest of the population in order to address “unfairness,” and long on criticism of President Obama’s inability to completely transform the American economy in the face of concerted Republican obstructionism. Not that the role of the GOP in failing to improve anyone’s lot—including their own—featured at all in Mittens’ mythology. Nope, it’s all down to the man in the White House:
“Is it easier to make ends meet? Is it easier to sell your home or buy a new one?” Mr. Romney asked, ticking through a litany of challenges facing Americans. He added, “If the answer were yes to those questions, then President Obama would be running for re-election based on his achievements and rightly so, but because he has failed, he will run a campaign of diversions and distractions and distortions.”
Fair enough: after all, it can’t be anything to do with Mitt himself, since he hasn’t held down a job in living memory.
In the coming months, steel yourself for the reprise of old hits:
The Romney campaign is aggressively looking into all aspects of the Obama administration, with a plan to present the president as a nice and likable but unsuited to solving the country’s economic challenges.
While you’re doing that, beware of incoming:
Mr. Romney will also begin introducing himself to a wider audience of voters who have yet to focus on the general election. In addition to having him talk about his background and business experience, the campaign will increase the presence of his wife, Ann, and five sons on the trail.
An actual quote from an actual Woman of Great Privilege, Ann Romney:
I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.
Mrs. Queen Ann Romney, who has been dispatched by the Romney campaign to go forth and charm the vajayjay crowd so they see just what a great wimmen loving guy Willard is and how the wimmenfolks should totally vote for him because he does NOT wage war on them like SOME Republicans might have, sort of, kinda done, tells us how cute and wonderful poor ladies who have no choice but to work and take care of the kidlings are. She luurrvvves her women without the choices she has.
But it’s OK because Willard completely values “those people” too! All he wants for them is to work hard and achieve dignity!
And I agree that sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us. I know that Ann has struggled with MS and breast cancer and I wouldn’t wish those diseases, or any others, on anyone. But she doesn’t seem to have learned from her struggles either that those cute, feisty little working moms that she just loves are perhaps having things a tad less easy than she does for the most part.
But by all means Ann, continue on your Journey of Privileged Cluelessness. I’m probably not going to lose much sleep worrying about Willard cleaning up on the women’s vote now.
