Monthly Archives: April 2012

Romney = Bush III

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Let’s see, where was I … oh, yes, politics. I wrote last week — “I’m saying Romney is George W. Bush without the Texas accent, people. You elect him, you’ll get tax cuts for the rich up the wazoo, huge cuts in benefit programs, and a return to foreign policy by the Marlboro Man.”

Well, now we have a confession, at least on the domestic side of the agenda. Pat Garofalo writes for Media Matters —

During an interview last week on The Fernando Espuelas Show, Alexandra Franceschi, Specialty Media Press Secretary of the Republican National Committee, said that the Republican party’s economic platform in 2012 is going to be the same as it was during the Bush years, “just updated”:

ESPUELAS: What do you mean by economic security? Regardless of who the ultimate nominee is, what’s the general idea that the RNC, or the Republican party in general, has in terms of this message?

FRANCESCHI: Well, it’s a message of being able to attain the American dream. It’s less government spending, which a Tarrance Group poll, came out last week actually, shows that the majority of Hispanics believe that less government spending is the way out of this deficit crisis. It’s lowering taxes so small businesses can grow and they can employ more people, because we understand that the private sector is the engine of the economy. It’s not the government. […]

ESPUELAS: Now, how different is that concept from what were the policies of the Bush administration? And the reason I ask that is because there’s some analysis now that is being published talking about the Bush years being the slowest period of job creation since those statistics were created. Is this a different program or is this that program just updated?

FRANCESCHI: I think it’s that program, just updated.

Of course, the RNC has its fingers crossed voters won’t remember that Bush’s policies are what screwed the economy. Paul Krugman writes,

Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are? If you’ve been following his campaign from the beginning, that’s a question you have probably asked many times.

But the question was raised with particular force last week, when Mr. Romney tried to make a closed drywall factory in Ohio a symbol of the Obama administration’s economic failure. It was a symbol, all right — but not in the way he intended.

First of all, many reporters quickly noted a point that Mr. Romney somehow failed to mention: George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, was president when the factory in question was closed. Does the Romney campaign expect Americans to blame President Obama for his predecessor’s policy failure?

Yes, it does.

Of course, I suspect a lot of voters need reminding by this point.

Yes, It Matters Who Wins

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I see that the usual bilge about how it doesn’t matter whether Romney or Obama wins in November has already started. You’d think after the 2000 election people might have shut up, but no.

Looking back, the only presidential election in my lifetime in which the outcome possibly wouldn’t have made much difference in domestic or foreign policy was 1976, Ford vs. Carter. In those days, a relatively progressive Republican and a relatively conservative Democrat were nearly indistinguishable.

Of course, in hindsight, one could argue that Ford’s loss helped set the stage for Reagan’s win in 1980. The choices we make in each election starts the nation on a new trajectory, and only a fool thinks he knows where any trajectory will go.

Anyway — part of the problem is that Mr. Etch-a-Sketch truly is a blank slate. His record in Massachusetts tells us nothing about what he might do as President. The fact that he appears to be relatively sane and intelligent compared to the clowns he has been running against should not reassure anyone. Especially if there are Republican majorities in the House and Senate, which Everyone Says is going to be the case, my best guess is that he’ll stand aside and let them do whatever they want. My other best guess is that he will continue to cater to the base that put him in office. That prospect should terrify the socks off any sensible person.

Here’s something else that ought to scare the stuffing out of everyone:

Mitt Romney wants the United States to get much tougher with Iran and to end what a top adviser calls President Barack Obama’s “Mother, may I?” consensus-seeking foreign policy.

With the presidential nomination all but locked up, an examination of Romney’s foreign policy pronouncements and the team advising him on those issues indicates Americans and the world might expect a Republican campaign that reprises the hawkish and often unilateral foreign policy prescriptions that guided Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

“The world is better off when the United States takes the lead. We should not be playing ‘Mother, may I?’ about sanctions on Iran and relations with China and Russia,” said Richard Williamson, a top Romney foreign policy adviser. He has advised presidents beginning with Reagan, held many diplomatic posts in past Republican administrations and was Bush’s special envoy to Sudan.

I’m saying Romney is George W. Bush without the Texas accent, people. You elect him, you’ll get tax cuts for the rich up the wazoo, huge cuts in benefit programs, and a return to foreign policy by the Marlboro Man. Of course, I realize you can find people on the Left who whine that Obama is no better than Bush. These people are asshats.

And he’ll have a Republican majority in the House and Senate, many of whom will be pushing him further Right.

President Obama had a bare majority in his first two years, but many of them were Blue Dogs who voted with the Republicans on critical issues. Congress in effect pulled him further Right than he probably wanted to go. And the twits of the world throw up their hands and say, well, there’s no real difference which one we elect.

Which is what they said about Bush v. Gore. They don’t learn.

So, we pronouncements like “I think that if President Obama had really wanted to pass a cap-and-trade plan he would have done so in the last term.” With this Congress? Are so many people really that stupid?

Jonathan Bernstein has a pretty good counter argument.

Going to Schuler’s list: Yes, both Obama and McCain will be interventionist. But if one would invade Iran and the other wouldn’t — well, that’s a massive difference, even if both would embark on Libya-type adventures. There’s a good chance that Guantanamo stays open regardless of who is elected, but Romney’s supporters include many who support reinstituting torture; that’s extremely unlikely to be U.S. policy if Obama is reelected. Again, I’d call that a massive difference. On taxes, too, one candidate supports modest increases in tax rates for upper-level taxpayers, while the other favors large tax cuts from current levels; if either party wins a landslide, it’s likely that those positions would be enacted. No, it would not be a return to 1990s levels (nor, most likely, would it get taxes quite to where Ron Paul might want them), but again, there’s quite a bit of money for both individuals and the U.S. Treasury on the line.

Right now I’d like to take names of anyone who thinks Romney would be no worse than Obama, so theirs can be the first boots on the ground when President Romney orders an invasion.

The Next Non-Issue

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Atrios said something this morning —

What we have to look forward to over the next several months is the following scenario repeated over and over again: somebody says something dumb, it gets elevated into a pseudoscandal, cable news freaks out, there are calls for various people to denounce whatever or whoever, and then eventually the whole thing calms down until the next time, likely because somebody was eaten by a shark somewhere.

So I see that Ted Nugent is threatening to shoot members of the Obama Administration if the President is re-elected. Or else he’s threatening to shoot himself; it’s a bit hard to tell. I’ll let the Secret Service sort that out.

So already people are calling on Mitt Romney to denounce Ted Nugent. just as there have been calls for President Obama to denounce Hilary Rosen and everyone else in North America who has ever said anything that upset the Right.

And y’know what? I don’t bleeping care if Mittens denounced Ted Nugent. A politician should be held responsible for many things; what some brain-damaged gasbag says is not among them, unless the gasbag is on his staff. We’ve got more important stuff to be arguing about.

Wanker of the decade is Tom Friedman, btw.

Dignity of Work for Thee, but Not for Me

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I got a kick out of this segment from last night’s Maddow show, hosted by Chris Hayes.

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Throughout human history the upper classes have always believed the lower classes have to be forced to work. That’s what’s really screaming out at me in Hayes’s commentary. It’s the attitude coming from upper class people who see themselves as inherently virtuous, just because, looking down paternally on the less fortunate and thinking you will prove your worth to me by working your ass off for me.

CNN Poll: No Change in Gender Gap

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This just in —

The survey indicates women voters back Obama over Romney by 16 points (55%-39%), virtually unchanged from an 18-point advantage among women for the president in CNN polling last month.

The poll was conducted two days after Democratic strategist and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen created a controversy by saying that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life.”

“That remark may have little long-term effect on women voters,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “By a two-to-one margin, the women surveyed saw President Obama as more in touch with the problems facing American women today.”

We won’t know for sure until some more polls come in, but I will be honestly surprised if there is any significant change in President Obama’s approval ratings among women because of Mrs. Romney’s self-centered hissy fit about how hard she works.

National Guard-Gate Revisited

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A Texas Monthly article by Joe Hagan revisits the controversy over the gaps in George W. Bush’s National Guard service and the damage done to Dan Rather by the 60 Minutes story about it.

(Note: It’s a long story, and if you want to read it you’d better print it out now, because I understand that it will go behind a firewall in a couple of days. )

It’s still mostly a story about missing documentation. It does establish that the head of the Texas Air National Guard, Brigadier General James Rose, did make spaces in the Guard for both G.W. Bush and the son of Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen. It also establishes that Bush was allowed to drop out of flying in 1972. Ten other pilots were allowed to drop out that same year, but the rest of them were much older and had had more than two decades of experience. Bush had been flying for two years.

As the story says, this wasn’t exactly illegal. It just shows that the Texas National Guard was a “loosely regulated fiefdom,” and Gen. Rose could dispense favors as he wished.

There is still no evidence that Bush reported for duty in Alabama when he said he did. The existing records say he blew off two drills for certain. The article also says that for part of the time he was being paid for his duty in Alabama he actually was in Houston. More than that is kind of a blank. By all appearances he was allowed to skip out of the rest of his Guard duty. He says otherwise, but any documentation that might have cleared that up is mysteriously missing from his military record. Which is pretty much what we all knew back in 2004 when the 60 Minutes segment ran.

Of particular interest to me was this:

But the man officially credited with inspiring a fusillade of blog attacks was Harry MacDougald, known on message boards as Buckhead, a GOP lawyer in Atlanta who missed the segment but downloaded the Killian documents from the CBS website later that night. He specifically claimed that the memos used proportional spacing and superscripts that didn’t exist on typewriters of the early seventies. …

… In any case, MacDougald’s arguments about the documents turned out to be inaccurate. He acknowledged as much in an interview with me in 2008. And in a speech given that same year, Mike Missal, a lawyer for the firm that CBS hired to investigate its own report, said, “It’s ironic that the blogs were actually wrong. . . . We actually did find typewriters that did have the superscript, did have proportional spacing. And on the fonts, given that these are copies, it’s really hard to say, but there were some typewriters that looked like they could have some similar fonts there. So the initial concerns didn’t seem as though they would hold up.”

… which is what I said at the time, and was mercilessly skewered for it. But, dammit, I had typed and typed and typed on those typewriters in the early 1970s, and there was nothing on those memos that couldn’t have come out of one of the better 1970s-era electric typewriters — proportional type, precise centering, superscripts, etc.

If course, since the memos Dan Rather and his staff had were photocopies, there is no way to prove they were authentic, which was why it was stupid on Rather’s part to use them as proof of anything. There was plenty of “story” without them, but with them the bogus type font issue ate up all the oxygen and became the story.

The Right basically was allowed to establish that the memos were phony mostly by screaming and stamping their feet real, real loud, and without the originals they couldn’t be proved wrong.

Hagan also says that at the time of the 60 Minutes broadcast the Associated Press had been pressing the Pentagon for some other documents that they believed would reveal the truth about the “lost year.” The AP actually asked CBS to wait on their story so as not to spook their sources. But CBS didn’t wait, and once the story became radioactive the AP dropped its investigation also.

By now any original documents that might show us something have been destroyed or rotted in a landfill somewhere, so unless Dubya himself confesses we’ll never know the whole story. Damn shame.

Righties Declare Victory in the War on Women

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However, at the moment I don’t feel conquered. A bit tired, but not conquered.

Speaking of wars — history tells us that at the end of the first day of the Battle of Shiloh, Confederate General Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard telegraphed Richmond that he had won “a complete victory.” History also tells us that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman also assumed the Confederates had won. He sought out his commanding officer, General Ulysses S. Grant, to receive his orders for retreat.

Sherman found Grant hunkered under a tree, in the rain, smoking a cigar. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman said. And Grant, after another puff of the cigar, said, “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.” There would be no retreat.

The next day Union troops routed the Confederates and won the day, and the battle. Beauregard’s premature assumption of victory haunted the rest of his military career. Although, truth be told, his association with the Confederacy ended up being a worse career move.

I always think of General Beauregard whenever people declare victory a bit prematurely. At the Village Voice, Roy Edroso describes rightbloggers taking virtual victory laps and even performing psychological post-mortems on the conquered Left.

[Rosen’s] comments are a symptom of an underlying intolerance for values that exist outside pockets of liberal majority,” claimed Right Speak. That is, they represent (deep breath) “the mindset that traditional, conservative culture is bad as it exists outside the two coasts and other liberal centers of thought, such as higher education, it is dangerous, because the more it is allowed to be considered as mainstream, the more acceptable it will seem to all when legislation is passed one step at a time that eliminates and erodes many of the values the rest of the country holds.”

“I feel the left is riddled with insecurity,” explained AJ Strata. “They are intimidated by the rich, the powerful (see our military), the successful (another form of rich), and the happy. They thrive on sustaining the moment they revolted from parental oppression (be it religion, sexual orientation, taste in clothes, whatever). Why they even consider having or raising kids is beyond me. Maybe it is more of that lashing out and trying to prove they were right when they went full anarchist to leave the nest.” Whoever would imagine there were enough such people to elect a President? America must be in a very grave state.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Mittens is calling Hilary Rosen’s remarks an “early birthday present.” So far, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Mittens have told us why Mrs. Mittens has been deprived of the “Dignity of Work.”

It may be a few days before we know if the “mommy war” flap put any dent in the gender gap working against Mittens, or if the rightbloggers are pulling a General Beauregard. But if things work out the way I suspect they will, I have some advice for them:

Mittens Is Going to Be Very Sorry

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He probably thinks he has found the key for winning back women’s votes by piling on the old “mommy wars.” But then Chris Hayes found this, from January:

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So, according to Mittens, stay-at-home moms don’t understand the “dignity of work.” Chris Hayes continues,

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And Chris Hayes reminds us that for years we’ve heard that poor and single mothers must be pushed into the work force so that they aren’t lazy and dependent. But wealthier women actually enjoy tax benefits for staying home. If you want to see more of this morning’s program, see the Chris Hayes page.

Ryan Grim spells it out at Huffington Post. See also Alex Seitz-Wald at Think Progress

Most of us who had to work to support ourselves and our children had it up to here with the “mommy wars” years ago. Yes, raising kids is work, but raising kids while working full time is more work. A lot more work. Especially when you can’t afford housekeepers and cooks and nannies.

I think Mittens may be about to find out that the “mommy wars” aren’t the opportunity he thought they were. Let’s see what Mr. Etch-a-Sketch has to say about his welfare policies in the next few days.