Mitt Watch: What Sandy Tells Us About The Candidate And His Party

Oct 31st, 2012

UPDATE 4pm CST 11/1/12: In this piece, I made mention of Gov. Christie's very public praise of the President's management of the disaster response. The GOP has begun to savage him for it. That didn't take long.

Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath are perfectly legitimate political issues. That anyone would argue otherwise is ridiculous.

Chait puts it best:

"What you are going to see over the next week is an overt effort by Democrats to politicize the issue of disaster response. They're right to do it. Conservatives are already complaining about this, but the attempt to wall disaster response off from politics in the aftermath of a disaster is an attempt to insulate Republicans from the consequences of their policies."

The GOP has directly targeted our national disaster response mechanisms, having gone so far as to threaten a total government shutdown last year while seeking a nearly forty percent cut to first responders. The outright elimination of FEMA has become a central position among the party's leadership.

The GOP's Real Problem

July 3rd, 2012

You may have heard about New Hampshire state Rep. Bob Kingsbury (R-Laconia) claiming that a primary cause for high crime rates is... kindergarten. 

You might be thinking its just another crazy Tea Party reactionary making wild pronouncements based on lunatic assumptions. What's the big deal?

From HuffPo's coverage:

"The Republican candidate for governor, Ovide Lamontagne, declined to address Kingsbury's comments during a radio interview last week."

This continues to be the real story. The GOP is incapable of policing their own. They are so afraid of their delusional base that otherwise decent legislators are complicit in the quickening American decline. 

"They Are Running Against A Fictional President"

Feb 28th, 2012

Bill Maher sums up the contemporary GOP:

"This is the bubble they live in. It's hard to get actual facts into this impermeable membrane. They are running against a fictional president. A president who has slashed defense, who has raised taxes, who goes around the world apologizing to different countries, who coddles terrorists, all of which, of course, never happened. But that's who they think the president is."

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George Will Vs. The GOP On Defense

Feb 10th, 2012

A few days ago, conservative columnist George Will penned a withering critique of current Republican messaging on defense. He begins with nothing less than a rebuke of the entire Iraq misadventure:

"Hours — not months, not weeks, hours — after the last U.S. troops left Iraq, vicious political factionalism and sectarian violence intensified. Many Republicans say Barack Obama's withdrawal — accompanied by his administration's foolish praise of Iraq's "stability" — has jeopardized what has been achieved there. But if it cannot survive a sunrise without fraying, how much of an achievement was it?

Few things so embitter a nation as squandered valor; hence Americans, with much valor spent there, want Iraq to master its fissures. But with America in the second decade of its longest war, the probable Republican nominee is promising to extend it indefinitely." EMPHASIS OURS

In fact, all of the GOP contenders (with the exception of Ron Paul) are now in a mad dash to outdo one another in promising more wars, longer wars and bigger wars. The situation is out of hand and these positions are dramatically at odds with the will of the people.

Dog Catches Car

Dec 5th, 2011

Paul Krugman points out one of the risks should the GOP defeat Obama next year:

Image via

"The Washington Post quotes an unnamed Republican adviser who compared what happened to Mr. Cain, when he suddenly found himself leading in the polls, to the proverbial tale of the dog who had better not catch that car he’s chasing. “Something great and awful happened, the dog caught the car. And of course, dogs don’t know how to drive cars. So he had no idea what to do with it.”

The same metaphor, it seems to me, might apply to the G.O.P. pursuit of the White House next year. If the dog actually catches the car — the actual job of running the U.S. government — it will have no idea what to do, because the realities of government in the 21st century bear no resemblance to the mythology all ambitious Republican politicians must pretend to believe. And what will happen then?"

The View From Abroad - GOP Field Edition

Dec 3rd, 2011

Wow. And we thought it looked bad up close. Mark Pitzke writes for Der Spiegel:

"Africa is a country. In Libya, the Taliban reigns. Muslims are terrorists; most immigrants are criminal; all Occupy protesters are dirty. And women who feel sexually harassed -- well, they shouldn't make such a big deal about it.

Welcome to the wonderful world of the US Republicans. Or rather, to the twisted world of what they call their presidential campaigns. For months now, they've been traipsing around the country with their traveling circus, from one debate to the next, one scandal to another, putting themselves forward for what's still the most powerful job in the world.

As it turns out, there are no limits to how far they will stoop.

It's true that on the road to the White House all sorts of things can happen, and usually do. No campaign can avoid its share of slip-ups, blunders and embarrassments. Yet this time around, it's just not that funny anymore. In fact, it's utterly horrifying.

It's horrifying because these eight so-called, would-be candidates are eagerly ruining not only their own reputations and that of their party, the party of Lincoln lore. Worse: They're ruining the reputation of the United States."

That these folks are not just damaging their party's brand but the country's is an ominous sign. It would serve the GOP voters well to remember that the President's primary obligation is to lead internationally as our Commander in Chief.

The Cracks Widen

Nov 27th, 2011

If you haven't yet read David Frum's blistering critique of the modern GOP in NYMag yet, you really need to:

"This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong."

Sure, Frum was booted from the club some time ago for failing to pass its tests in ideological purity. But, he is far from alone. In the last few years, David Stockman, Bruce Bartlett, Andrew Sullivan, Edward Luttwak, John Dean, Mark Zandi, Kenneth Duberstein and hundreds of other thinkers who once comprised the brain trust of American conservatism have been made to feel unwelcome for refusing to propagandize. While I certainly don't agree with Frum's declaration that conservatives got 'the big questions... right' decades ago, I will agree that they offered rational proposals and didn't try to collapse the deliberative power of the Senate.

In part, Frum's piece is a form of psychoanalysis:

"... conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too."

The cognitive dissonance Frum describes now extends to even the simplest of arguments; There are no jobs because of Obama can be followed, after a single breath, with declarations that the unemployed are lazy.

There are ways out using traditional conservative ideas, but, as Frum laments, the GOP is simply disinterested.

"Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation."

And that, as they say, is that.