Recent history of CNN's VP fever

The McCain camp has played McCNN like a fiddle with constant signals on their Vice Presidential pick, none of which has meant anything but distraction from Obama's trip overseas. Here's a partial list:

• 7/18: Romney and the veepstakes. No intention of actually picking while the media provides a free conduit for bullshit speculation, which they love more than sex.
• 7/22: Talk of a VP announcement. Bullshit. They never intended to announce, only to talk about it with the drooling press. Well, did it happen?
  
• 7/22: VP!! Only it's Jindal this time. Yum, the press corps loves the taste of that well-ripened bullshit.
• 7/22: Jack Cafferty bites on the VP penis sandwich.
  
• 7/23: A bad day with town halls gone awry and a gaffe on Iraq, but there's still VP speculation, though now it's Pawlenty (and you're welcome for my skipping the lame pun). The media as Charlie Brown keep trying to kick that football.
• 7/23: Pawlenty gets another story. OMFG.
• 7/23: VP speculation coming and going with a no that no one believes from Jindal. If they believed it, they'd miss the Jindal story next week.
• 7/24: Pawlenty again! Announcement any day now. Media insane with the delight of a dog licking its privates.
• 7/25: Bloom off the rose! VP now Portman (Ron). Man, this is an oldie but a goodie.
• 7/25: No VP announcement. No announcement as long as we can keep you in stories.

Then, quick as a wink, no more stories for a week. Oh, there's the occasional token story about a Democratic pick, but no McCain VP in sight. Sigh.

A flack's wet dream

McCain campaign aide gets press release onto A1 of the Washington Post with a substance free story about the timing of the Republican veep nomination. What a worthless story.

Fun (but also worthless) to guess:

• Romney - how many houses between him and McCain? More than ten, so we know they can relate to the mortgage crisis.
  
• Jindal - Mini-He scares everybody a little
  
• Ridge - threat level low
• Portman - who? A Bush budget director? Somebody's pulling wool. Is he the only Ohio guy they've got?
  
• Pawlenty - my guess
  

Mitt right but stupid

Look, non-proliferation has always been a liberal approach to a national security problem. The internationalists were for it, the conservatives simply wanted to use military force. Anyone ever heard of preemption? Of course, the internationalists were not all liberals, but the driving force behind engaging adversary and ally alike to reduce the spread of nuclear weaponry was us libs.

People who have a brain understand that arms control and preemption may both be needed at different times. You can tell liberals from conservatives by which stick they reach for first.

Mitt Romney gets points for saying so but only enough to get him the booby prize.

What's really stupid on his part, though, is that his definition of 'bipartisan' is "caving to the conservatives". I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that he labors under this misconception, since that has been the Broderist, Liebermanesque definition for the past twenty years.

True to form, John Roberts totally misses the obvious logic of the story.

Earth to wingnut

Every Republican campaign needs someone to semaphore their ugliest messages to the wingnut pundits and to media outlets like McCNN. Mitt Romney kept Eric Fehrnstrom barking on a leash. Too bad he didn't use a choke chain.

John McCain's junkyard dawg is Tucky Bounds. It's his job to get Gingrichian phrases like "partisan rant" and "hysterical diatribe" into circulation.

The wonderful upside of this story is that Obama is hitting the right notes:

“I’m running for president to change course, not to continue George Bush’s course.”

“I want to be perfectly clear with George Bush and John McCain, and with the people of South Dakota,” he said at a Watertown campaign stop. “If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate that I'm happy to have any time, any place and that is debate I will win because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for.”

It's no wonder the McDuhbya camp is feeling a little sting in their morning newspaper.

Poor non-competitive Republicans

Mitt Romney's campaigned hard in 2004 to put more CEOs into the Massachusetts legislature. He directed an unremittingly (ha) negative campaign, but he failed utterly. I live in one of the Senate districts that he targeted with laughably nasty mailings at the rate of several per week, and it turned people off.

My Senator won 60/40.

Now the Republican Party is having trouble recruiting candidates. Boo-hoo.

They're going to run on the argument that their electoral failure is the best reason to elect more of them. Yeah, right.

Massachusetts has had Democratic government for two years, and the world has not fallen apart. Taxes haven't gone up. There are still checks and balances here, unlike Washington before 2006. Democrats aren't the monolithic blocs that Republicans are.

Another elitist calls Obama elitist

Mitt Romney has enough money that he thought he could buy the common touch. Maybe he still does.

Not in a million ... years.

The little things in life

One of the joys of the doom of Mitt Romney's Presidential candidacy is the prospect of Eric Fehrnstrom unemployed. Too bad a hired lip, who has mastered the bullshit, passive-aggressive rejoinder the way he has, will always have a comfortable home in the Republican lie-rarchy.

He was so good at getting under my skin that I noted his name the first time I ever heard of him, which must have been 2001 or so.

Trilateral omissions

Tom Tomorrow perfectly captures the fundie, wealthy, and bully factions of the Republican Party, as represented by the three remaining candidates.

And, by the way, what was I thinking to consider McCain only a bully panderer, when he is clearly one of them. Maybe I was confused because he's a paleocon bully, not a neocon bully.

Click image for full cartoon in Salon.

Is this why I'm tired?

John McCain just put a down payment on the nightmare scenario. The GOP standings are very clear, despite the maunderings of the media that the race is still up in the air:

• McCain - 616
• Romney - 295
• Huckabee - 170
  

If Mitt Romney weren't so obviously a two-faced smarm peddler, he might have won enough fundie delegates away from Mike Huckabee. As it is, Romney and Huckabee have to combine to deny McCain the nomination. Who's going to emulsify that combination of oil and water (snake and holy)?

So, the Republicans who despise McCain because he's a teensy-weensy bit heterodox seem to be deciding that 95% of a loaf is better than Hillary, even if they supposedly lose Ann Coulter in the bargain. Who knows, maybe they'd like to lose her, though they haven't usually shown that sort of good judgement.

Once the war for November starts in earnest, count on the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham experiencing foxhole conversions and supporting McCain. Otherwise, they'll have to take a woman and a Clinton or a black man with Muslims in the woodpile.

I'd really like to escape this nightmare and get some rest...

What to look for on Super Tuesday

Imagine Ted Baxter reading this: As the votes roll in across this great nation, you'll know it's a good day for John McCain if Mitt Romney fails to hold Massachusetts. Hillary Clinton should also do well there, having fired back at Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama with a Kennedy endorsement of her own - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

And blah, blah, blah...

Oh, yeah, turnout! What's the turnout going to be like?

Please, please, please, let an underdog win somewhere, so we can use our canned Super Bowl analogies. (Shh, we can always say that Mike Huckabee wanted to be the New York Giants today but couldn't quite put together the power rush.)

And now, the latest update on Natalee Holloway and the dirtbag van der Sloot... (I'm totally up to date on that because I spent a couple hours in a pizza place that had Headline News on, and -- barf!)

What to look for on Super Tuesday: the votes. They come in plenty fast these days (most of the time).

No one needs a bunch of well-turned-out vacuous news commentators to predict the outcome with 35 seconds left in the fourth quarter (ha!), hypocrites all for caring about John Edwards's haircut when they have stylists on staff. We can all wait for actual news.

Meanwhile, as they media bloviators are forced to wait along with the rest of us, could they cover Duhbya's irresponsible budget and the FBI's request to tag us all with biometrics when we can't even agree to tag explosives? How about some coverage of that?

Clinton's popularity

Bill's, not Hillary's.

There is no doubt that Bill Clinton has a magnetic effect on people. But that's true of many politicians. The Washington press corps keeps telling me that Duhbya has it, too, though frankly their other work - and the obvious smirking disdain he feels for all of us - makes me very skeptical of that claim.

In any case, it has become an article of faith that Bill is popular and that his administration was popular. I don't remember it that way.

What I recall is that most everyone liked the boom times but didn't give him too much credit for them, a little but by no means most of it. For various reasons, most people viewed him positively, though even staunch Democrats had misgivings, and liberals like me could enumerate his many failings to go with his many, though relatively small, successes.

I think Bill got high popularity marks not so much because people liked him, really liked him, but because they saw what a royally screwed up raw deal he was getting from the VWRC. They knew he didn't deserve that, and they answered pollsters accordingly.

Don't we all do that to polls? Figure out what question they're really asking and answer it. So, for example, if they ask, "Do you approve of the job that Congress is doing?", are they asking, "Did Congress fulfill its appointed mission from the 2006 election?" If so, HELL NO! But if the pollster's asking, "Do you prefer having the Democrats in charge of Congress?", sure, o.k., yeah.

One large basis of Hillary's candidacy is the popularity of Bill. Sure enough, his administration was miles ahead of Duhbya's unbroken serial fuck-up. But is that enough to convince the voters? I'm not sure it's deep enough for that.

I saw a Hillary ad tonight, and she touted her 35 years of experience. That experience is real, but it comes entirely via partnership with Bill, and that makes it very difficult to assess separately from him.

If we're going to vote for a nonetheless Constitutional third Clinton term, and it's going to be a referendum on the first two, can the less gifted politician in the family actually deliver it? Against Mitt Romney, sure, but how about John McCain? Putting a natural bully in the White House, after Duhbya has shown how easily bullied the Congressional Democrats are, scares me.

Sunday comics - behind the chemical shed

For the full cartoon from Adam Zyglis in the Buffalo News, click the image.

"Heh, I like the way that Mitt Ronmey treats his dawgs."

Bullmitt

I'm no fan of the smarmy, dishonest, pandering excrescence that is Mitt Romney, but seriously who besides a reporter cares about the middle school social organization of the Republican candidates!

GOP contender - Romney

Mitt Romney is a classic wealthy. How dare you mere reporter point out my bullshit! "Listen to my words." Romney believes in his own divine right even if he has to wear special underwear. Mitt has plenty of money, which helps him cover the fact that he has trouble with message discipline (though still much better than Huckabee's). Since he's had control of the business agenda his whole career, he's convinced that he can say the most ridiculous things without the people he hasn't laid off calling him on it.

I once worked for a company whose CEO sent a voicemail to the whole company saying that he would rather choke to death on his own vomit than sell to a certain software bottom-feeder. Three months later, he did sell out to that exact company. Oh, he had hedged that he would almost prefer asphyxia. Really, aspiration drove him, either way. Jimi Hendrix, no thank you. Walk away with $290 million, giddy-up!

Mitt would never say anything as plebeian as that. Jeepers Crow, no. But situational lying is a necessary skill in the rarefied heights of companies such as Bain that profit by deal-making instead of making products. "We really want to make this deal, but there are a couple of problems." Yeah, and one of those problems is we're really buying your competition, but we want our competition to pay a premium price for you.

Mitt won't mention bodily fluids, no, but he is more than happy to make obviously stupid, pandering, and anti-Constitutional appeals to the bullies. "Double Guantánamo," for example. The bullies aren't very smart, so they'll buy it.

So here we are. The heretic Mormon with no common touch and the glaring willingness to transparently lie and bullshit is the only contender who hasn't queered the deal with the most important three Republican constituencies. Even though he has a long history of previous lies and bullshit to appease us in Massachusetts ("I'm prochoice", "I'm moderate", "I'm for universal health coverage"), he has tried to atone for those, and the fundies will have nowhere else to go, other than to stay home, so most of them will rationalize the gaping doctrinal chasm.

The only barrier that lies between Romney and the nomination is the Republican Party's appetite for more bullshit. Since Duhbya still pulls 30% in the polls, and those are the people who will vote in Republican primaries, I think they're licking their chops. It's Romney's to lose.

Full of Mitt

So, Mitt Romney makes a big deal that "lobbyists aren't running his campaign," but, when challenged by a reporter who names a particular lobbyist who's a senior advisor to Mitt, he gets bent out of shape and repeats his narrow parsing formula over and over again.

Let's get this out in the open: No lobbyist manages campaigns. They're disjoint sets.

Mitt changes his positions with the political wind and his need to tack into it. Mitt claims to be places he wasn't with civil rights pioneers he never met. Mitt makes substance-free statements intended to be misinterpreted. There's nothing that comes out of his mouth you can trust.

It's all bullshit. He's playing to the Republican base.

Assumption of insincerity

So, if John Edwards were really insincere about poverty and corporate power, is this what it would look like? For a Republican to get this treatment, he has to do visible 180s about anything inconvenient (Romney); for a Democrat, it's standard treatment. And it's not as if either of these signature issues is actually convenient, at least not to the conventional narrative of the media.

Flattery vs. challenge

Now that the candidates for President have ads on the Boston stations targeting southern New Hampshire, I'm seeing the usual mix of advertising themes. My sanity would be better served by turning off the damn TV, but it's winter, and I don't expect to be sane in the darkness.

John McCain is flattering New Hampshirites - just as one maverick to another - that they don't care what the pundits say. Hey, it could be 2000 again, and he could be only 64.

Mitt Romney is making the usual bullshit claims - there will be more change in the next ten years than the last centuries (only if Edgar Cayce was right) - as a vehicle for delivering his insincere optimism. Since he has money, he's also doing jujitsu on McCain, saying nice things and then slamming him with the Capitol dome.

Even Obama is relying on atmospherics, too. His flattery is a common dream - not bad at all.

Hillary is making an argument that she can deliver change. I respect that. Her claim that she has "35 years experience making change" sounds a little like a long career as a Masspike toll-taker.

Only Edwards is challenging the electorate to make a significant change. That's why he's my candidate.

So, Republicans are flattering you and sniping at each other. Democrats are doing better, not of course perfectly.

Flattery should make alarms go off in your head. It is almost always a signal of insincerity and and offer to trade a compliment for what the flatterer wants from you. People who vote for flatterers get the government they deserve.

And, all you idiots riding my tail in your 15 mpg full-size pick-ups when I'm already close to the car in front of me, you're included. When Dodge wants you to be ram-tough and Toyota has joined into the automotive penis-fluffing, they are kissing your ass for the sole purpose of lifting your wallet.

What Iowa means - Republicans

Even less than it means to the Democrats...

Huckabee blunted Mitt Romney's early money-buys-name-recognition strategy. Mitt won't be running the table.

Huckabee, though, is still a big question mark. Ed Rollins only thinks he helped.

Mitt Romney still has money. I expect to see ads leaking over the border that tag Huckabee as an opportunist.

The three old fossils are still as viable as they were before. For Fred Thompson, it's probably a disappointment that he did too well to fade out of the race.

Duncan Hunter is still hopeless. He's probably crying that everyone stole his issue, but that's his face-saver for quitting.

Key to Mitt Romney

There is only one thing you need to remember about Mitt Romney: His every public act is about brand positioning, not anything that would imply real commitment.

Politics is just another form of business for him, and that requires the ability to discard his past like the cheap suit he has never had.

Mitt makes a funny

Mitt Romney has the sense of humor of someone who has made a lot of lame jokes in front of groups of business associates who have to laugh. In his heart of hearts, I'm sure the Mittster thinks he's prettier than Bill Clinton, too.