How Long Before Romney Reaches for the Panic Button?

Here's what Mitt Romney likely read with his Cheerios this morning (don't expect him to be in a chipper mood today):


[MSNBC's First Read:]

It’s not an even race – Obama’s ahead: The Olympics are wrapping up and, at the end of July, when the Olympics began, we wrote that we were basically at halftime of the general election -- and Obama had a narrow lead. Well, it’s a little bigger than that now. (People may want to quibble, but you can’t dismiss every poll on sampling.) There’s clearly movement toward the president and clearly problems for Romney personally. We had found it in our polling for the last month and it hadn’t shown up everywhere yet. Now it has. The latest evidence: three new polls out today – from CNN, Fox, and Reuters/Ipsos – all showing President Obama leading Romney by seven points or more and at or near 50%. (CNN 52-45%, Fox 49-40%, Reuters/Ipsos 49-42%). What’s more, Romney continues to have an image problem. In CNN, Obama’s fav/unfav is +14, Romney’s -1. And in Fox, Obama’s +12, Romney’s +1. (Ipsos didn’t ask fav/unfav.)


Worse for Mittens, James Downie points out that the economy is actually improving, although not as much as anyone on the left would like. Needless to say, those on the right -- having bet all their stake against America -- do not want to see the economy improve. This likewise puts the Mittenman in a bad position.

"Before this week, Obama’s chances were pretty good, largely because of strong numbers in the swing states. Now the gap is widening. If the economy doesn’t, er, bail Romney out, he will need a brilliant performance in the next few months to win," he writes. "A performance, if the campaign so far is any guide, that Romney doesn’t have in him."

Actually, if history is any guide, Romney has never had it in him. The only reason that he's not a career politician is that he has a lot of trouble winning elections. He failed to unseat Ted Kennedy, won the governorship of Massachusetts, and went on to do not so awfully well in presidential politics. In all the campaigns Mitt Romney has run, exactly one was a winner. This is not a stellar record of accomplishment.

Romney's running mate choice is coming up here pretty quick and that can shake up these numbers. But that would likely be a bounce. For a brief moment, John McCain got ahead of Barack Obama -- before falling even further once everyone realized what a nasty lightweight Sarah Palin was.

And the choice of Palin was the result of one big factor -- panic. Almost-always-wrong pundit William Kristol urged McCain to pick the Queen of the North and McCain listened. Let the record show that listening to Bill Kristol is a very bad idea. But everyone said McCain needed to choose someone who'd shake up the race and McCain took that advice, dialed up to eleven.

This is what conservatives do when they're up against the wall -- they panic. That's why Republicans lost their minds after 9/11 and start torturing people and tapping phones illegally. They really don't seem capable of measured response. I'm not saying that Romney's going to choose some complete nutjob as a running mate -- he probably wont -- but his attacks are going to get more desperate and transparent. See his welfare lie for an example. He won't have to choose a Sarah Palin to lose, he's becoming a Sarah Palin before our very eyes. As Mitt Romney gets deeper in trouble, he runs further to the right.

And running further to the right is running away from the general election voter. Unless Romney can break the cycle, he'll wind up helping Obama win by making a series of boneheaded decisions at the advise of the base.

Can Mitt break the cycle? Like Downie, I just don't think he has it in him.

-Wisco

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Guns, Nazis, and Conservative PC Taboos

Earlier this week, I wrote about the tendency of the right to wrap themselves in the cloak of victimhood whenever there's a mass shooting. I failed to mention that part of the reason for this is clearly distraction. In the temple shooting in Wisconsin, so many rightwing memes come into play -- the anti-immigrant fever, the right's soft-on-gun-crime positions, the belief that everyone but Christians (and Jews, who I guess are honorary Christians) are inherently un-American, the bigoted view of Muslims as turban-wearing "ragheads," etc. People on the right desperately want to avoid talking about all of this, so they claim to be victims whenever something like this happens.

For example, over at Media Research Center’s NewsBusters site, we learn that referring to neo-Nazis as "far-right" is the worst thing ever. MRC is a rightwing BS factory that pretends to be a media watchdog -- like Media Matters for America -- but is in reality an attack dog sicked on any media outlet that fails to slavishly adhere to conservative spin and rightwing political correctness. There, we learn that "CNN Smears Political Right, Labels Wisconsin Shooter's Racist Neo-Nazi Band as 'Far Right'."

I wish I were kidding. The term "far-right" is now banned in connection to Nazis -- as it's been historically applied fascists since they came into existence -- under wingnut PC. The only things that are "right wing" are good things, never bad things, and the concept of conservatism gone mad must never, ever be discussed. Such things are taboo.

Once the mantle of victimhood has been assumed, we don't have to talk about all the things conservatives and racist fanatics inarguably have in common -- i.e., the aforementioned the love of guns, hatred of immigrants and non-Christians, etc. Instead, we talk about how the real victims are always American conservatives. And this is a distraction we can ill afford.

Writing for Salon, Jordan Michael Smith revisits and follows up on Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano's report on rightwing extremism. The conclusion; rightwing terrorism is real (as this weekend has proved all too clearly) and that we ignore it at our own peril.

The report found that "neo-Nazis were trying to infiltrate law enforcement agencies" under a strategy they called "ghost skins." "White supremacist presence among law enforcement personnel is a concern due to the access they may possess to restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage and to elected officials or protected persons, whom they could see as potential targets for violence," the report read.

You might also remember that this report was met on the right with the Great Shield of Wingnut Victimhood, because it contained the words "right wing extremists." So, it was more important that America be distracted from the areas of agreement between neo-Nazis and conservatives than it was that America be protected from them. God forbid someone point out the undeniable fact that white power types had a lot to do with Arizona's odious "papers please" law, for example. Or that white supremacists look at the Tea Party and see an obvious recruitment opportunity. What is important was that we talk about something else. Anything else. Like, say, how mean people are to wingnuts.

So, just as it's always "too soon" to start talking about gun control, it's a "smear" to point out that -- to a person -- organized white racists are rightwing extremists. If that means that it becomes more likely that there will be other acts of rightwing terrorism in the future, so be it. The right is totally willing to take that chance, because to admit otherwise dings their "perfect patriots" propaganda image.

Victimhood's not about protecting America, it's about protecting the Tea Party brand.

-Wisco

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In Any Mass Shooting, the 'Real Victims' are Always Conservatives

It wasn't long after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was critically wounded and six people were killed in Tucson that we learned that the real victim of gunman Jared Lee Loughner was Sarah Palin. People were being mean to Sarah, just because she'd run an ad putting Giffords in crosshairs. It was terrible.

Now that a racist nutjob killed six people in a Milwaukee Sikh temple, we're slowly learning the most important aspect of that crime -- that the real victim is Michele Bachmann. Turns out some random people on Twitter thought her bigoted anti-Muslim witchhunt might've had something to do with all this (Sikhs are often confused with Muslims) and that means everyone on the left is after Shelly -- because random people on Twitter speak for every liberal.

And of course, this all traces back to the source of all conservative victimhood: an unreleased Department of Homeland Security report saying that "right wing extremists" posed a greater danger after the economic downturn and the election of America's first black president. Despite the fact that "right wing extremist" means people like racist nuts who might shoot up places of worship, the right took up the mantle of "right wing extremist" -- I guess because playing the victim card is so important that you'd actually identify with neo-Nazis and survivalists to play it.

Now that gun massacres are becoming regularly scheduled media events, complaining about gun proliferation is an attack on conservatives. Such talk is verboten. We have to wait for a decent amount of time to pass, out of respect for the victims. Never mind that, with a massacre a month, there's no opportunity for time to pass. Apparently, there's a waiting period for talking about guns. Irony.

And Wisconsin only missed a previous gun massacre by dumb luck.


[WMTV:]

A man plotting to murder abortion providers in Madison is stopped by police only after he makes a mistake.

Tonight he's behind bars and the clinic continues to see patients.

When police responded to a report of an accidental shot fired into a room at a Motel 6 on Madison's east side they had no idea they were about to uncover a murder plot.


The would-be killer, Ralph Lang, told police he wanted to "lay out abortionists because they are killing babies." Lang is mentally unbalanced, but was ruled competent to stand trial. I don't want to kick conservative victims while they're down, but killing abortion providers doesn't seem like the act of a leftwing extremist to me. I think we can conclude that -- like so many nuts with guns -- Ralph Lang was a rightwing nut with a gun. But to point that out would be an attack on conservatives and probably the Tea Party.

Because in a crime of mass murder, the real victims are always conservatives.

-Wisco

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Since When do Republicans Get to Complain About Lying?

It's ugly. It's dishonest. It's quintessentially Republican. So why do conservatives hate it? Because they're on the receiving end of their own brand of politics for a change.


[Las Vegas Review-Journal:]

Sen. Harry Reid caused a stir this week when he told an interviewer that Mitt Romney hasn't released more of his tax returns because "he didn't pay taxes for 10 years." On Wednesday, Reid doubled down on the charge.

In an interview published Tuesday, Reid said an investor in Bain Capital, the former private equity firm of the Republican presidential candidate, told him in a phone call that Romney had paid zero taxes.

"Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain," Reid told the Huffington Post, declining to identify his source. "But obviously he can't release those tax returns. How would it look?"


Whether this is true or not is a matter for debate and the pedigree of the claim ("this one guy told me this one thing this one time") strongly suggests it's not all that true. This all has the strong scent of horsecrap (and not Olympic horse dancer Rafalca's horsecrap, which I'm assured smells like roses) -- which means it also smells a lot like a Republican talking point.

Mitt Romney is, after all, the candidate whose entire campaign consists of a list of lies much, much longer than your arm. One of Mitt's most recent lies was also one of his most shameful; that the Aurora theater shooter broke the law to get his weapons. He didn't. Romney was covering for the gun industry by lying about a mass murder -- and in doing so, arguably increasing the likelihood of future massacres. This is a conscienceless man.

Nevertheless, National Review's Jim Geraghty asks -- nay, demands! -- that independent fact-checkers look into Reid's claim, but there's the question of how. No one at Annenberg or PolitiFact has access to Mitt Romney's tax records, so they're pretty much helpless here. The only way to prove Reid wrong is to take a look at those tax records Mitt Romney refuses to release.

What gets me about this is that Republican media feels they have the right to complain about it. I know, this is the party with several decks of victim cards forever at the ready, but still... You'd think there was some limit to the amount of hypocrisy they'd allow themselves. And after the birtherism, the accusations of Marxism and Nazism, the "secret Muslim terrorist sleeper agent" conspiracy theorizing -- in short, the entire rightwing anti-Obama messaging industry -- you'd think they'd be a little more prepared to defend themselves from the same post-truth politics they've unleashed on the nation. Were they foolish enough to introduce their poison into the American political system without first developing an antidote?

That would seem to be the case.

None of this is to say that Reid is justified in doing this -- although I have to admit to enjoying the "just desserts" aspect of the whole thing. But I am saying that Republicans have no right to complain about it. None at all. When you've decided the truth is irrelevant to winning, you don't get to complain that your opponent is being dishonest. In other words, don't dish it out if you can't take it.

And quit whining about being hoist by your own petard.

-Wisco

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Mitt Bush

Sometime in 1998 0r '99, a group of lunatics plagued with the curse of certainty discovered the perfect presidential candidate. He was an amiable, likeable guy, but more importantly he was dumber than a box of rocks. He believed rightwing talking points with all his simple heart and had guaranteed name recognition. He wasn't the shoe-in they thought he was, though. After actually losing the popular vote, he became president anyway -- thanks to five Supreme Court Justices with no respect for democracy. Their candidate was eventually sworn in as the President of the United States and quickly proved the depth of his competence by losing a fair fight to a pretzel. By the time George W. Bush left office, America had suffered the worst terrorist attack in American history, was engaged in two wars, was having a debate over whether it was OK to torture people, and had a smoking ruin where the economy used to be.

In a more rational world, the lunatics plagued with the curse of certainty -- or "neoconservatives," as they're more commonly known -- would be out of politics for good. Any hint of neocon influence on a candidate would be the first sign of the death of the campaign and children would point and laugh at them when they walked down the street.

But this is not a more rational world. These guys show up all the time on talking head shows, where they're treated as oh-so-serious political minds, rather than the complete and utter failures that history shows they to be. And oftentimes the other talking heads are the boneheaded pundits who cheered on the neocon idiocy. Thanks to a media all too happy to allow people to fail upward -- or, at least, laterally -- neocon clowns can continue their neocon clown show, without fear that anyone will point out just how completely incompetent they've proven to be. Meanwhile, the media's neocon cheerleaders get to keep their pundit jobs, despite the fact that they've just spent the last twelve years at least getting nearly everything exactly wrong.

And so the cycle rolls on. Bush's inner circle seeks to become some other candidate's inner circle, hoping no one will notice. They seek to rebuild the neocon machine, to begin anew the work of The Vulcans, to try again at that New American Century, and to find another patsy to take the fall in the history books should it all go haywire again. And they've found one. One Willard Mitt Romney.

Over at ThinkProgress, they've been doing a great job of pulling back the curtain on the Romney campaign and exposing all the little Bushies behind it. Mitt Romney is the next George W. Bush and his campaign advisers show it. On the economy and foreign policy -- Bush's two greatest failures -- Team Romney is just recycled Team Bush. And his policies are just recycled Bush policies.

On economics, TP's Travis Waldron writes that Romney "seems to be chasing an agenda that truly is 'Bush updated.'"

"Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s economic advisers include two former chairmen of Bush’s Council on Economic Advisers and a veteran of Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign," he writes. "The policies favored by those advisers include even bigger tax cuts, more deregulation, and support for dismantling Social Security."

Because that all worked out so great the last time, I guess.

And on foreign policy, we're told, "[W]hat’s troublesome about Romney on foreign policy is what’s cooking behind the scenes. Gen. Colin Powell recently complained that Romney’s foreign policy team is 'quite far to the right.' Indeed, veterans of the Bush/Cheney administration 'pepper' Romney’s foreign policy team and the so-called 'Cheney-ites' are reportedly winning the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s ear."

If you're wondering if these guys could possibly be as awful at foreign policy as I'm making it seem, consider Mitt's recent world tour -- you know, the one where he managed to piss off just about everyone. That should give you a measure of the quality of advice his neocon advisers are giving him.

And worse, how willing he is to take that lousy advice.

If you liked the Bush years, you'll love the Romney years. On the other hand, if you're not crazy... Well, Mittens isn't your guy.

-Wisco

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