Republicans on Mitt

There's only one thing that Mitt Rmoney has been dead solid consistent on: Rich people should pay lower taxes.

Meaning in bullshit

Vanity, thy name is Rudolph.  Giuliani...

[I]f Giuliani turns out to be the best Republican for the job, the 2008 candidate for the GOP nomination said, "I could probably be talked into doing it."

No one with a normal ego could even consider a run for President.  Rudy wants to be talked into running.

Yeah, right, a groundswell of support will prove once and for all that Donald Trump and Chris Christie are mere pretenders to the asshole vote, that they remain not only a potent part of the Republican base but also now and forever Rudy's most gaseously effusive supporters.

Of course, the big media role in all this is clear too.  They have Rudy's number in their cell phones, and he'll take their calls.  Flattery goes both ways in the elite electronic village.  Accountability?  Not so much.

There is one small excuse for CNN giving Giuliani a platform.  They can tell that there's not a credible Republican candidate yet in the race.  Trotting out their old warhorses is just a way to vamp until ready and fill the vast desolate air time with some kind of familiar noise.

Signifying nothing.

Eager to please

The New York Times is the best newspaper in the country. Yeah, I'm damning with faint praise.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the gray lady, has been a defender of official bullshit from the time I first took notice of him in the late 1990s, when the Times's thrusting of Republican bullshit about Bill Clinton needed his defense. For Keller, it hasn't mattered whether the official bullshit is the Times's own or comes from Republican political operatives and their business interests. Keller will have no part in calling bullshit bullshit. He'd rather add more onto the compost heap.

Now, true to form, his spokesperson claims that calling torture torture would have been inadmissably biased:

When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.

Words have meaning. Waterboarding has always been torture. The special pleadings of the torture-advocating war criminals of Duhbya's ugly administration don't change those meanings.

Torture is torture, no matter who applies it, no matter who suffers under it. It is possible to do evil to evil. Even for Americans...

Our media culture no longer recognizes this, and even mainstream Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani, encouraged by the unwillingness of big media to call bullshit, refuse to deal with the plain truths of our national stains. A culture so debased by lying to itself is in existential trouble, not from al Qaeda but from its own corruption of character.

Update (7/5): More good criticism from Salon:

[When the Washington Post and the New York Times] defended their acts of cowardice and dismissed criticism as tendentious, they went beyond harm. Their pride in subservience was a disgrace.

Why we listen to Rudy

In the aftermath of Rudy Giuliani's straight-faced claim that there were no terrorist attacks (none!) during Duhbya and Darth's excellent adventure, Joe Conason asks why we listen to such a fact-free buffoon. Giuliani has someone managed to slide over, not just the shoe bomber and the anthrax attacks and the many attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan; he has managed conveniently to forget 9/11 itself, the one news item that pushed him onto the national stage after his career had effectively ended in widely shared disdain for his ugly personality and for every one of his municipal policies except for community policing.

But it's not just Rudy who should have no claim on our credence. Dana Perino had made the same claim. Mary Matalin had, too. Among others.

The reason this goes is that slow-learning Democrats have failed to assert every damn day that there's nothing a Republican says that you can trust. The media are not going to hold these guys accountable for even being in the ballpark of accuracy. The right browbeat them out of their ref job years ago, to the point that they only call penalties on Democrats - or offsetting pox-on-both-their-houses fouls.

This can be funny, but it's also dangerous. A culture that cannot even grapple with what's true and what's false is doomed.

Yet, all these Republicans will be back on TV spouting lies just as soon as some producer's Rolodex needs them...

No liberal could get this coverage

Rudy Giuliani, who holds no position of importance in any organization, said something critical of Barack Obama. O.K., fine, he once executive officer over New York City on 9/11, and it's much bigger than many states whose Republican governors get attention waaay out of proportion with the population they represent. So maybe Giuliani's opinion is news.

Now, though, he's going to repeat his criticism on an RNC teleconference. Maybe there's some slow news day on which that would be news.

But there is no day when news is so slow that the mere announcement that Rudy's going to disagree again with Obama in the future is news. Only a Twitter twit would think otherwise.

Mark Preston mush think that his job is the regurgitate every damn press release he gets - as long as it's from a Republican. No Democrat (well, maybe a pretend Dem) could ever get coverage like this. Ever. From anyone.

Aphrodisiac of power

Bernie Goldberg is a tool. He has found a profitable niche that keeps him in face-puffing booze, paid for by wingnut welfare, and he's going to hammer it without regard for fairness. He and Ann Coulter have the same job, just different shticks.

Was Chris Matthews a lunatic for saying that Obama's speech made a thrill go up his leg? Damn straight. That blithering chatterer has issues, man. Alcohol seems to be one of his, but his propensity for man-crushes didn't start with Obama.

At many times before, Matthews has swooned over the manliness of Republicans - Duhbya (nice package, eh Chris!), Rudy Giuliani (so manly he looks good in a dress!), and of course John McCain (cut of his jib? Chris would sail him). If you look too closely at this, it's enough to make you say, "Eeeew!" This is a guy who'd want a date, not with George Clooney or Brad Pitt, but with Henry Kissinger. Barf.

Goldberg will never tell you this, though. He'll pretend that Matthews is a straight (heh) party-line liberal Democrat who only has man-crushes on Democrats. This is bullshit, the wingnut pundit's stock in trade.

If...

If Rudy Giuliani has read Rudyard Kipling lately, his own self-imputed manliness may have fooled him - and CNN - into believing that he still has Presidential prospects.

In fact, Giuliani was adamantly rejected by the Republican Party, long before the normal people in America had a chance to pile on. The more people saw of Giuliani, the less they liked him, and these were Republican base voters, not exactly the most discerning witnesses to history in an America that couldn't really give a shit about any history that's not transparently mythic.

Giuliani is a has-been who clings to his press operation. For some reason, CNN has yet to figure that out. And here I thought the reason Ted Turner started CNN was to give America something besides New York.

Democratic coalition

It's always fun when Bill Maher and Paul Krugman agree:

Thus [Rudy] Giuliani asserted that Wasilla, Alaska, isn’t “flashy enough” for Mr. Obama, who never said any such thing. And [Sarah] Palin asserted that Democrats “look down” on small-town mayors — again, without any evidence.

What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you.

Republicans need to stop saying Barack Obama is an elitist, or looks down on rural people, and just admit you don't like him because of something he can't help, something that's a result of the way he was born. Admit it, you're not voting for him because he's smarter than you.

Not hard to sort out which quote is whose, is it? But read them both, and you'll see that Krugman gets in a lot of good, pithy slaps at the bullshit that pervades Republican talking points. Maher? Goes without saying.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass

Rudy's out, Florida be praised.

Since I've been running down his chances for a long time, some past comments...

July 16, 2007:

Rudy the authoritarian gets it next. At some point, someone is going to make a commercial using all the stills and videos of Giuliani in a dress.

Sept. 8, 2007:

Rudy Giuliani has insinuated his America's Mayor branding into the media narrative, but his real appeal is visceral. Rudy is America's Augusto Pinochet. He is offering to save America from the brown people as long as we don't look too closely at how he does it. This is obviously his appeal to the anti-democratic reactionaries known as strong Republicans. I still don't think even Rudi's faux tough enough to look macho in a dress, and I expect Romney to put cross-dressing fashion ads in heavy rotation if he needs to.

Nov. 30, 2007: Rudy Giuliani, cheating on YOUR taxes

and...

The New York Times treads right up to the line and, though it doesn't quite say openly that Rudy Giuliani is a compulsive liar, cheat, and bullshitter, nowadays, that's close enough for plaudits.

Jan. 18, 2008:

Rudi, ah, Rudi, it's not that we hardly knew ye. It's just that you are too obviously a mean, authoritarian SOB. And to the Republican base, those are your good qualities. I never thought a repeat cross-dresser could win in the Republican Party; his poll numbers were a media creation doomed to die embarrassingly. Except that nothing embarrasses Rudi, not even all that icky personal stuff.

GOP standings to date - the pretenders

Eliminate all the options that are impossible and whatever is left, however unlikely, will happen.

Starting with the pretenders:

• Duncan Hunter, who he? He has a delegate because he is a delegate. Shift a few bellwether brain cells, and he could be tied with Rudy Giuliani
• Rudi, ah, Rudi, it's not that we hardly knew ye. It's just that you are too obviously a mean, authoritarian SOB. And to the Republican base, those are your good qualities. I never thought a repeat cross-dresser could win in the Republican Party; his poll numbers were a media creation doomed to die embarrassingly. Except that nothing embarrasses Rudi, not even all that icky personal stuff.
• Fred Thompson was the guy you date, not the guy you marry. Seriously, does that show how gag-a-maggot the Republican Party is, or what? Fred jumped the shark (I am so glad I finally learned what that means) before he even jumped into the race. He wanted the Presidency as a retirement gift, and even the Grand Old Party is not that senescent.

Ron Paul needs a category all to himself. He has managed to attract all the scruffy Objectivists who think they're the second coming of John Galt, whoever he was (the man ain't got no culture), and evidently some of them know how to charge a credit card on the Internet. He's right about Iraq for all the wrong isolationist reasons, and the rest of his platform would have been neandercon in the 19th century, which is where he evidently found a wormhole from which to emerge into contemporary Texas daylight. Good thing, too - in any other state except maybe Louisiana, more people would laugh at him than vote for him. OK, maybe Idaho, too.

More to come...

The year of Huckabee

Will 2008 by Mike Huckabee's year, or is he about to jump the shark? As long as he doesn't last past November 4, I don't really care.

The fact that Huckabee is even in the race testifies to the weakness of the field and the dissatisfaction that even the core constituencies of the Republican feel toward them. Romney would be perfect if he hadn't insincerely moved left for Massachusetts. Giuliani would be perfect if he hadn't been seen so often in a dress - being an asshole is no hindrance. Thompson would be perfect if he could stay awake.

So, Huckabee has an opening, and only the usual owners of the GOP object.

Huckabee is a crazy man, however. He's a wild Christian and evolution-denier. He touts a middle-class-killing federal sales tax of 30% or more, letting the really rich off the hook entirely. He thinks Iraq is an "ideological war on terror".

Giuliani's MRI

So now Giuliani's hospitalization was due to a "massive headache" instead of flu-like symptoms. If he really had "every test imaginable," he must have had an MRI to eliminate or confirm several of the possible diagnoses that I'm aware of for massive headache:

• stroke
• AVM
• brain tumor
• meningitis
• migraine
• sinusitis
  

Yet the reporter doesn't report on any of this. Instead, she fritters away column inches on therapeutic aspirin, which practically every man Giuliani's age is taking anyway.

Personally, I think the cabin pressure story put out by the campaign is bullshit. Rudy's campaign is hiding something. The question is what?

More Sunday comics blogging

The problem with trying to handicap the Republican field is that they're all so handicapped already. For example, before Fred Thompson dithered away his buzz, I thought he would be the perfect empty vessel into which Republicans could pour their shake 'n' bake cult of personality. He could play another vacuous character on the national stage and quench the silly wingnut thirst for another Ronald Reagan.

But, no, he couldn't even remember his best line from The Hunt for Red October, "Your average Russkie, son, don't take a dump without a plan." Turned out even Jeri didn't have much of a plan to prop up her man without his unmistakable lassitude showing through.

So, the national press corps is back to searching for the dark horse who has the legs to pass Romney and Giuliani. This week it's Huckabee, which really shows how far the lunacy has spread.

Who can unite the plutocrats, the authoritarians, and the theocons? Draft Dick Cheney!

Candidates and cancer

Two Republican candidates have cancer. The spouse of one Democratic candidate has cancer. Which has gotten the most pundit and press attention?

Elizabeth Edwards's recurrence of cancer was conventionally supposed to spell the end of her husband's candidacy, but the Edwardses decided to live the rest of her life to the fullest and hopefully for years, rather than settling down to wait for her to die.

Fred Thompson has non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but the press has basically said ho-hum. I happened to channel-surf past "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" last night, and the contrast between his appearance there - playing himself only with better lines - and his skeletal appearance now was a hell of a lot more than better make-up.

Rudy spent the night in the hospital with those ubiquitous "flu-like symptoms". His spokeswoman said afterward (my emphasis):

After precautionary tests the doctors found nothing of concern at this time...

Will the press herd question this? My bet: nope.

Update: I had forgotten (blame the media for not reminding me incessantly) that John McCain had enough skin cancer on the left side of his face that Joan Rivers would have been jealous of the opportunity to pull the jowls back in.

Finding nuggets of policy

There is actually some policy coverage in this story:

[Giuliani] focused on economic issues, particularly his plans to cut the federal corporate tax rate, ease regulatory restraints, and provide generous tax incentives for individuals to buy their own health insurance. More than four months after sketching the outlines of a healthcare plan, Giuliani has provided no details on its impact on the US Treasury.

It's not the topic of the story, which starts out as another poll-driven, horse race story, but at least it's in there in paragraph 9. And the rest of the story after the jump covers Giuliani's stump speech with actual context and a critique founded in reality. Bravo!

So, let's look at Rudy's nostrums:

• Lower the corporate tax rate - the Republican target is 0%, maybe less
  
• Ease regulatory restraints - sure, let's have more corporations writing the rules that govern them; that'll help consumers and anyone who breathes or drinks water or wants safe (lead-free) products
  
• Provide tax incentives to buy health insurance - in other words, give money back to people who already have enough money to have health insurance
  

Rudy Giuliani, cheating on YOUR taxes

Part of the DailyKos name-that-scandal contest.

NYTimes off the reservation

The New York Times treads right up to the line and, though it doesn't quite say openly that Rudy Giuliani is a compulsive liar, cheat, and bullshitter, nowadays, that's close enough for plaudits.

Here's the clearest of many illustrations:

In a recent radio advertisement by the campaign about his health care proposal, Mr. Giuliani repeated another false statement that he had been using on the campaign trail.

Frank Luntz's take on the Republican attitude toward bullshit is also instructive:

“When he talks about New York, people see it,” Mr. Luntz said of Mr. Giuliani, “and they feel it, and if a number isn’t quite right, or is off by a small amount, nobody will care, because it rings true to them.”

Whether something's true or not doesn't matter. Only fooling the people with their feelings matters.

There's also some compulsive reportorial "balance". Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama get dinged. (I bet John Edwards wishes he were in the story, too, even to get corrected!)

Obama exaggerated the degree of increase in the public debt. He said "doubled". The Times should have served its readers better by noting the facts: From Jan. 20, 2001 to today, the national debt has increased from $5.7 trillion to $9.1 trillion, an increase of a mere 60%.

No time at the moment to check Hillary's NIH statement.

Update: Hard to be sure what Hillary said or meant to say without context, but it is true that NIH funding has increased in every area under Duhbya.

Oops!

NYC firefighters despise Rudi. Giuliani's spokesman then steps in it:

"There are many, many 9/11 families who lost relatives who are very, very supportive of Rudy and what he did before and after 9/11," Safir said. "It's sad when people get used politically."

Oops!

Of course, Howard Safir wants to be used. Not sure about the others.

Homeocrite

Brent Bozell is such a hypocrite that 'hypocrite' is not an emphatic enough word. Since it's built out of 'hypo-' for too little and '-crite' for (self-)criticism, let me suggest substituting 'homeo-' for its association with homeopathic remedies that are so diluted they are unlikely to contain even a single molecule of the original active ingredient.

Bozell criticizes Carole Simpson for endorsing Hillary Clinton. Simpson is no longer a working journalist! Yet Bozell, despite ample appearances on Hannity & Colmes, has not raised a peep about Hannity's fundraising for Rudy Giuliani.

Really, you can't take conservatives seriously about anything.

(Note: No mention of this from Peter Schworm, who needs to get better about context.)

Freeh association

Louis Freeh is advising Rudy Giuliani on homeland security, as if he had a good record in that department.

There are other interesting names on Rudy's fund-raising letter:

• Ted Olson, bargaining for a Supreme Court appointment
• Bill McCollum, impeachment prosecutor

But, there's a business return envelope, so minus $1 to the campaign to take the next step toward American fascism.