The Hippie President


"Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term," Jo Becker and Scott Shane write in The New York Times,  "has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record."   Current and former Obama advisers have told them of a "paradoxical leader" who

has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”

Yet the administration’s very success at killing terrorism suspects has been shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, only one has been taken into American custody, and the president has balked at adding new prisoners to Guantánamo.

“Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the intelligence committee. “They are not going to advertise that, but that’s what they are doing.”

Administration officials deny such a policy exists and

The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets, and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration’s “false choice between our safety and our ideals.”

But he has found that war is a messy business, and his actions show that pursuing an enemy unbound by rules has required moral, legal and practical trade-offs that his speeches did not envision.

Becker and Shane note additionally of the President's policy "No one would have imagined four years ago that his counterterrorism policies would come under far more fierce attack from the American Civil Liberties Union than from Mr. Romney."

But there is one Republican who apparently believes all this qualifies President Obama as a modern-day, misguided Gandhi.  Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh stated (video, from Media Matters, below)

Well, let me tell you something.  There is no question that the hands of our military are tied. We've heard of about these rules of engagement many previous occasions in Afghanistan. It's what happens when you got a pacifist as president, when you have somebody who believes that the United States is to blame and in fact deserves some of this stuff and that we can't display superpower status. We can't project power.





Rendition, military commissions, and indefinite detention all have been retained by Barack Obama.  But the real problem, according to the nation's top radio talk show host, is that he just hasn't killed enough Muslims.




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Garbage In, Garbage Out



I do not come to bury Ruth Marcus.  I come to praise her.

Somewhat.  A few of the questions the Washington Post syndicated columnist recommends be posed to the two major presidential candidates tomorrow night are well-informed, probing, and worthy of answers for the American people.   Two others, however, reflect disturbing ignorance.

She critically prefaces one of her questions by stating

President Obama, you have been criticized for not supporting the recommendations of your own fiscal commission. Why didn't you? Do you regret that choice?

You have offered what you describe as $4 trillion in debt reduction over 10 years. Yet your $4 trillion is $2.3 trillion short of what the Simpson-Bowles commission said was essential.

It's not entirely, or even primarily, her fault, of course.   Dean Baker noticed that even the august, paper-of-record New York Times has referred to "the proposal by President Obama’s fiscal commission led by Erskine B. Bowles, the Clinton White House chief of staff, and former Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, a Republican."   It is common throughout the media to refer to the "Simpson-Bowles report" or, in shortened form, "Simpson-Bowles," as if the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform actually had issued a report.   The Commission by-laws, as Baker notes, read

The Commission shall vote on the approval of a final report containing a set of recommendations to achieve the objectives set forth in the Charter no later than December 1, 2010. The issuance of a final report of the Commission shall require the approval of not less than 14 of the 18 members of the Commission.

Baker notes, however, "there was no vote on anything by December 1, 2010 and there was never a report that received the approval of 14 of the 18 commission members. Therefore, there was no report of the commission. That's pretty simple, isn't it?"

Marcus unknowingly propagates another faulty premise when she asks

you promised in Charlotte to take “responsible steps” to strengthen Social Security. Yet in your acceptance speech four years ago you said that “now is the time ... to protect Social Security for future generations,” and then did nothing on Social Security during your first term. What do you plan to do if re-elected? Would you support Gov. Romney’s proposal to raise the retirement age to reflect increases in longevity? To lower the rate at which benefits grow for higher-income seniors?

Paul Krugman, recognizing that the increase in longevity cited by Marcus and so many others is well overstated, explains

Consider, in particular, the proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age, supposedly to reflect rising life expectancy. This is an idea Washington loves — but it’s also totally at odds with the reality of an America in which rising inequality is reflected not just in the quality of life but in its duration. For while average life expectancy has indeed risen, that increase is confined to the relatively well-off and well-educated — the very people who need Social Security least. Meanwhile, life expectancy is actually falling for a substantial part of the nation.

These less well-off and lesser-educated individuals are not likely to capture the imagination of most of the news media, generally relatively well-off and more highly educated.  There has been little attention paid, in fact, to the news reported on September 21 by The New York Times:

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

Perhaps there would be consideration of this large, though declining, group of Americans if one of those awful cliches stereotyping voters would emerge.  We have had "soccer moms," "NASCAR dads," and "Walmart moms."
 
But unless "diner women" or some other hideous term trivializing this segment of the populace is popularized, it's hardly likely that many journalists will pay attention.   The elites might even find some solace in the statistics, for the racial disparity between relatively uneducated white women and black women has declined or apparently, reversed.  But the drop in life expectancy for white women without a high school diploma reflects yet another instance in which the American economy has left a lot of people behind, even if it's inconvenient to notice.





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And She Doesn't Live In A Teepee, Either


It was full steam ahead for conservative bloggers, writers, and talk show hosts when Boston's other paper, the Boston Herald, reported in late April that Elizabeth Warren, who as a professor at Harvard Law School (from which she now is on leave)  had told the institution that she was in small part of Cherokee heritage.    A blogger at Ace of Spades HQ claimed "When people are willing to lie that easily for little or no reason, they'll lie about anything. Someone should start reviewing her academic papers."   Syndicated columnist Mark Steyn, who periodically substitutes for the host on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, wrote "Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran'ma as Cherokee, but let's cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn't be black. She would if she could, but she couldn't. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind – "people who are like I am," 31/32nds white – and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together."  La Shawn Barber blogs "The point I tried to make in the column was how ridiculous it is for the blond, blue-eyed Elizabeth Warren to list herself as a racial minority, an American Indian, not that the descendants of American Indians cannot be blond and blue-eyed.

Limbaugh himself couldn't be restrained,  commenting "This is the woman Obama wanted to run a consumer fraud division or what have you.  But what reservation did this woman grow up on? When was the last reservation she was at? What's the last pack of cigarettes with no sales tax that she bought?  But this is who they are."

Ever the opportunist, Limbaugh used the flak over Warren's claim as fodder for generally attacking liberals, whom he claimed

categorize people. They make moral judgments on people on the basis of surface matters.  They don't see the humanity of an individual.  They see the skin color; they see the sex, the gender, the orientation -- and from there they make their judgments on people.  And here's proof of it.  She is an Indian, one-thirty-second of an Indian, because her papaw had high cheekbones.  And all Indians have high cheekbones.

Before critiquing racialism, Limbaugh should have checked in with his preferred Massachusetts Senate candidate, incumbent Scott Brown (R-Cosmo), who at his debate with Ms. Warren, unashamedly argued "Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color.  And as you can see, she is not."

Credit Scott Brown for political acumen.  Recognizing he is running in Massachusetts, he has avoided criticizing  Democratic President Barack Obama and has employed the politically correct terms "person of color" and "Native American."

But American ethnicity is a complicated matter, a melting pot or mosaic or at times even a hodgepodge.  It may be hard enough for a member of one Indian tribe to recognize another, and probably more difficult for, say, for a Caucasian, Asian, or black person to make the distinction.   And here comes Scott Brown, native and resident of the State of Massachusetts, with fewer of its residents of such background than 40 other states, to say of Elizabeth Warren, "and as you can see, she is not."   Among the Senator's detractors was Bill John Baker, who asserted "The Cherokee Nation is a modern, productive society, and I am blessed to be their chief. I will not be silent when individuals mock and insult our people and our great nation.”

The perfect term for the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North America and South America and their descendants, formerly referred to as "Indians" and increasingly as "Native Americans," remains elusive.      Julia Good Fox, professor of American Indian Studies at Haskell Indian Nations University, states "I think people still have this perception that all American Indians look like this image of Plains Indians from the 1800s.   We don’t look like how we would have 200 years ago either, so to expect Indians to look the same (as they did then) makes no sense."

Nor does it make any sense to assume, as Brown does, that all such individuals are "persons of color" (whatever the phrase means).   Bill John Baker would know.   He is 1/32 Cherokee, the same as claimed by Elizabeth Warren.  And this "person of color" looks like this:

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But Vote For Anyone You Want



It was a year in which:

Greece joined the European Economic Community;
Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6) was inaugurated as the 40th President of the U.S.A and, worse, was shot and wounded by an assailant;
Fifty-two American hostages were released by Iran in its effort to humiliate Jimmy Carter, who had left the Presidency minutes earlier;
The great, nearly incomparable, Dan Rather became primary anchorman/anchorperson of the CBS Evening News;
Talent-challenged Valerie Bertinelli married Eddie Van Halen;
Francois Mitterand, whose name is unknown to many Americans under the age of 50, became President of France;
Kim Carnes' Bette Davis Eyes spent more than two months as #1;
Pope John Paul II was shot and wounded in St. Peters' Square;
An earthquake in Iran killed at least 2,000 people;
Associate Justice Potter Stewart retired and was replaced by Sandra Day O'Connor, who thereby became the first woman on the United States Supreme Court;
Wayne P. Williams was indicted for the murder of 2 of 28 black children killed in Atlanta;
In a widely popular move- because the casualty was air traffic safety, not football- fired 11,500 air traffic controllers who had struck two days earlier;
Hosni Mubarak became acting President of Egypt;
President Reagan sent the since-deceased Presidents Ford and Nixon, and former President Carter, on their way to Egypt for the funeral of Anwar Sadat.
Thomas J. Paprock, J.D., DePaul University College of Law, founded the Chicago Legal Clinic, as Wikipedia terms it, "to assist the working poor and disadvantaged."

Thomas J. Paprocki?  You'll be forgiven if you don't recognize the name, especially because that occasion is as as much- if not more- a relic of the past than are all the other events which took place in 1981.

In a column and video posted by Catholic Times, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Springfield, Ohio, and obtained by Right Wing Watch, Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki slams the Democratic Party platform.   He is exorcised by approval of a mere "single passing reference to God" in a "blatant disregard for the rules and for the apparent wishes of about half the delegates."  He criticizes the plank supporting same-sex marriage, that repealing the Defense of Marriage Act,  and the replacement of advocacy of "safe, legal, and rare" abortion with the right "regardless of the ability to pay."

Contending that these "matters... explicitly endorse intrinsic evils," the Bishop argues

My job is not to tell you for whom you should vote. But I do have a duty to speak out on moral issues. I would be abdicating this duty if I remained silent out of fear of sounding "political" and didn't say anything about the morality of these issues. People of faith object to these platform positions that promote serious sins. I know that the Democratic Party's official "unequivocal" support for abortion is deeply troubling to pro-life Democrats.

After explaining the Church's nuanced position on the death penalty, the Bishop states that "different methods" in the platform to address "the needs of the poor, to feed the hungry, and to solve the challenges of immigration" are "prudential judgments about the most effective means of achieving morally desirable ends, not intrinsic evils."  Credit Paprocki at least with sticking to his talking points.   In a recent statement addressing the concern that the American Church may be aligning itself with the GOP, Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia declared (emphasis mine) "But Jesus didn't say the government had to take care of them (i.e., the poor), or that we have to pay for taxes to take care of them.  These are prudential judgments."   (Perhaps you missed Jesus quoted in the Gospels as saying "abortion is an intrinsic evil.")

Bishop Paprocki echoes Archbishop Chaput in an additional way.   Chaput claims to be a registered Independent "because I don't think the church should be identified with one party or another."    Though he transparently, and sarcastically, ridicules (in an even more sarcastic manner than my aforementioned "exorcised") Barack Obama as The Leader (in reference to his role in the Party), Paprocki states "I am not telling you which party or which candidates to vote for or against."  Nevertheless, the Bishop concludes by cautioning "I am saying that you need to think and pray very carefully about your vote, because a vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy."  

"I am not telling you which Party" to vote for, the prelate assures his flock, "but if you vote for a Democrat you're probably going to hell."   Additionally, of course, you ought to feel guilty for being "morally complicit" in "intrinsically evil and gravely sinful" actions.

By asserting that a Catholic who does not vote properly merely places the eternal salvation"of one's soul "in serious jeopardy," Bishop Paprocki qualifies his assurance that if a Catholic does not believe as he does, he or she is doomed.     Clearly, though, Paprocki, not coincidentally ignoring Scripture, is maintaining that the risk in voting the wrong way is absolute and nearly certain because he knows, and says so.   It's a slippery slope beginning with the belief that the eternal destination depends upon performing the moral act as the Church understands it.

Enough with theology, for if I assumed that my beliefs were correct, I would be following Bishop Paprocki down the dangerous road of concluding that God had confided all to me.   Of things worldly and secular, however, this we know:    Mitt Romney's running mate has been, and remains, a disciple of Ayn Rand, whose objectivist philosophy led her to an abiding faith in the radical philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism, as well as the atheism with which it is intimately linked.  

Paul Ryan remains devoted to Ayn Rand's heartless economic outlook, though he has separated himself from her atheism, which is similar to being fond of nachos- but without the cheese- or Joel Osteen's Christianity, but without being troubled by sin.   But don't take it from me.  It was Mitt Romney's running mate who himself contended, "there is no better place to find the moral case for capitalism and individualism than through Ayn Rand’s writings and works."  

To the guy who would be a heartbeat from the presidency, whom Paprocki agrees with on abortion and for whom the Bishop would like his constituents to vote, creating a system in which the powerful can more easily exploit the powerless is a moral issue.  To Bishop Paprocki, however, exploitation of the powerless by the powerful is a mere "prudential" issue, to be disregarded by constituents whom he is calling on to vote for the party hostile to the poor people he claims to be interested in.



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An Upper Class Love Affair


Joe Scarborough wants to fall in love-again.

Scarborough appears rather disgusted with his own party's presidential nominee, "neither a true conservative nor a courageous moderate" but "just an ambitious man" who "refuses to stick his neck out and take a stand on the critical issues of our time."   By contrast, in early 2008, he said Barack Obama "doesn't attack Republicans, he doesn't attack whites and he never seems to draw these dividing lines that Bill Clinton (does)."   (Imagine that- a black man who doesn't attack whites!)

But like a jilted lover, Scarborough now says

Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Charlotte exposed him as an intellectually exhausted politician. The man who brought Hope and Change to the Democratic National Convention four years ago exposed himself in Charlotte as a guy who has no new ideas and no clue where he wants to take the country over the next four years. Obama is now reduced to mindlessly repeating the same tired lines he trotted out on the campaign trail in 2008. He had somehow morphed from the political equivalent of a young Elvis rocking Mile High Stadium four years ago to becoming the fat, sweaty singer who haunted Vegas showrooms in the months before his most inglorious expiration in the summer of 1977.

Barack Obama, however, was not Scarborough's first love, or even the most prominent one.   That honor would go to two-term President Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6), who along with Margaret Thatcher (Scarborough falls in love with women, too)

was tough and unapologetic about what she believed. Ronald Reagan was tough and unapologetic about what he believed. They won their campaigns, changed their party and transformed their countries because they were conservatives who dared to tell voters they planned to radically transform their governments. They got elected and did just that.

Ronald Reagan did, in fact, dare to tell voters that he would cut their taxes.  He did not, however, dare to tell them he would explode the debt, undermine the nation's manufacturing base, or eviscerate the middle class.    Donald Barlett and James Steele note that after Congress passed legislation to stem with higher taxes the loss of thousands of textile jobs to imports

President Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill, calling it protectionist and a violation of free trade.  "We want to open markets abroad, not close them at home," he said in a refrain that had become distressingly familiar to American workers in many industries.  Even though he had just killed a bill that would have saved jobs, Reagan sought to assure textile employees that he was on their side and insisted that he would not "stand bt and watch American workers lose their jobs because other nations do not play by the rules."  In fact, that's exactly what he did.  There were 756,000 textile industry workers in 1984 when Congress and Reagan took up the issue of textile tariffs. By the time he left office, the number was down to 728,000.  In 2011, only an estimated 120,000 worker were left, according to the Labor Department.

As Barlett and Steele describe, it wasn't only the 40th President who pursued free trade policies which eliminated hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs in the U.S.A.  Still, as Thom Hartmann explained four years ago

We built the biggest industrial infrastructure, industrial economy in the world. We have gone -- when Reagan came into office we were the largest exporter of manufacturing goods and the largest importer of raw materials on the planet. And, the largest creditor--more people owed us money than anybody else in the world. Now, just 28 years later, we're the largest importer of finished goods, manufactured goods; the largest exporter of raw materials--which is kind of the definition of a third-world nation -- and we're the most in-debt of any country in the world. This is the absolute consequence of Reaganomics.

Scarborough criticizes the growth of debt under President Obama and laments Romney's failure to advance a plan to reduce it.   But under the president so admired by Scarborough, the national debt nearly tripled as the former governor reversed  the post-war pattern of reduction of  the debt as a percentage of GDP.

Nonetheless, Reagan's assault on the unions had an even greater impact upon the tax-paying middle class.   In August, 2011 The New York Times editorialized

THIRTY years ago today, when he threatened to fire nearly 13,000 air traffic controllers unless they called off an illegal strike, Ronald Reagan not only transformed his presidency, but also shaped the world of the modern workplace.

More than any other labor dispute of the past three decades, Reagan’s confrontation with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, undermined the bargaining power of American workers and their labor unions. It also polarized our politics in ways that prevent us from addressing the root of our economic troubles: the continuing stagnation of incomes despite rising corporate profits and worker productivity.

By firing those who refused to heed his warning, and breaking their union, Reagan took a considerable risk. Even his closest advisers worried that a major air disaster might result from the wholesale replacement of striking controllers. Air travel was significantly curtailed, and it took several years and billions of dollars (much more than Patco had demanded) to return the system to its pre-strike levels. 

That legacy remains with us.  The Times editors observed

By 2010, the number of workers participating in walkouts was less than 2 percent of what it had been when Reagan led the actors’ strike in 1952. Lacking the leverage that strikes once provided, unions have been unable to pressure employers to increase wages as productivity rises. Inequality has ballooned to a level not seen since Reagan’s boyhood in the 1920s. 

As the first graph below (from the Pew Research Center) displays, since 1980 the middle class share of national income fell from 60% to 45% while that of the upper class increased from 29% to 46%, an appreciable portion of which occurred during the Reagan years.    The second graph below (from the Center for American Progress) illustrates the decline in middle class share of national income paralleling the decline in union membership.

That's how it apparently is with some love affairs.  What he does to you, how he treats you, pales in significance next to those sweet little things he, like Ronald Reagan, whispers in your ear.






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Ay, Tis The Rub



Politico's Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman are not alone in believing

The kickoff presidential debate Wednesday in Denver is shaping up as do-or-die time for Mitt Romney, with the pressure intensifying this week after a flurry of swing-state polls showed President Barack Obama opening up a sizable lead.

Republicans, fretting about dwindling days for Romney to turn around his campaign, fear that if their nominee doesn’t come away with a decisive first-debate victory, he’ll continue to spiral downward and lose his last, best shot for a comeback.

The fear among donors and strategists: a break-even or so-so performance would subject Romney to a self-reinforcing cycle of criticism and pessimism in his own party that will send other Republicans fleeing and make it difficult for Romney to project a closing argument against Obama over the drumbeat of why-are-you-losing questions.

So the Mile-High face-off has gone from merely important to critical for a challenger in need of a break.

“It went from being important to being life-sustaining,” said GOP pollster Steve Lombardo, who worked for Romney in 2008. “Both from a fundraising perspective, to keep the money coming, and just a political perspective it’s huge. Romney can’t just do well and hold his own — he has to win and win decisively. If he’s at parity with the president, I don’t think that’s enough.”

There is, however, evidence from the past and simple common sense to indicate instead that of the three presidential debates, the one with the most lasting impact is likely to be the last.   Blogging about presidential debates, TV critic Eric Thurm reminds us that in 1984

The first debate went uncharacteristically poorly for Reagan. The president flubbed answers to Mondale’s charges that he wanted to cut entitlement spending and seemed out of his element. He spoke softly and unconvincingly on questions about a “secret plan” to balance the budget by the end of his second term. The medium of television, which in 1980 made Reagan’s personable nature and overwhelming charisma deadly for Carter, took its toll as the president aged. Mondale was perceived to have won, though not effectively enough to seriously change the tide of the election. Reagan, however, was under pressure because of his age (73, older than any other sitting president before or since), which suddenly became an issue in the campaign.

Reagan delivered a rambling closing statement or, as described here,  "displayed some confusion over closing statements, reinforcing for many viewers questions about his advanced age and his ability to govern for four more years."   But that did little to close the gap between the two candidates and merely piqued voters' interests in the second debate.

At the following, and last, debate, Reagan was asked

Mr. President, I want to raise an issue that I think has been lurking out there for 2 or 3 weeks and cast it specifically in national security terms. You already are the oldest President in history. And some of your staff say you were tired after your most recent encounter with Mr. Mondale. I recall yet that President Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuban missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?

He famously responded

I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.

Game, set, match.  The initial debate had whetted the interest of individuals who had, and who had not, watched the face-off and suspected that the incumbent was suffering from dementia or was simply too old to continue in the job.   Voters tuned in to the second debate to determine if their concerns were real, decided (probably incorrectly) they were not, and the election turned into a rout.

If any of the debates has a lasting impact on the election, it is likely to be the last, in which the impression of the candidates will be freshest in the minds of the voters.  Still, none of the debates is likely to have as significant an impact on the election as have presidential debates past, in part because of the substantially greater knowledge of both candidates possessed by the electorate in an age in which news, analysis, and opinion, from the center, left, and the right,  from both traditional and non-traditional sources, is far more widespread than in the past.

The idea that Mitt Romney's only remaining shot at gaining the White House is in the debates reflects a misunderstanding within the mainstream media of the burden he bears.   The resistance to reality is even more prevalent on the Republican right, which refuses to understand that its radical ideas are being rejected, preferring to blame the impending loss on one individual whom it never has trusted.  As Robert Reich explains

The Republican primaries, and then the Republican convention, have shown America a party far removed from the “compassionate conservatism” the GOP tried to sell in 2000. Instead, we have a party that’s been taken over by Tea Partiers, nativists, social Darwinists, homophobes, right-wing evangelicals, and a few rich people whose only interest is to become even wealthier.

These regressives were there in 2000, to be sure. They lurked in the GOP in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich took over the House. They were there in the 1980s, too, although Ronald Reagan’s sunny disposition gave them cover. In truth, they’ve been part of the GOP for more than half a century — but never before have they held so much sway in the party, never before have they called the shots.

The second view about Romney’s decline also explains the “negative coat-tail” effect — why so many Republicans around the country in Senate and House races are falling behind. Scott Brown, for example, is well-liked in Massachusetts. But his polls have been dropping in recent weeks because he’s had to carry the burden of the public’s increasing dislike of the Republican Party. The same is true with regard to Republican senate races in Florida, Virginia, and every other battleground state. 

Romney’s failing isn’t that he’s a bad candidate. To the contrary, he’s giving this GOP exactly what it wants in a candidate. And that’s exactly the problem for Romney — as it is for every other Republican candidate — because what the GOP wants is not at all what the rest of America wants. 

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Into The Abyss


This is not the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan.  Heck, this isn't the party even of John McCain.   It was a mere four years ago that a woman at the latter's campaign rally said of Barack Obama (famous video below) "he's an Arab."    McCain responded "no, ma'am, no ma'am.  He's a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have differences with on fundamental isues.  And that's what this campaign is all about."

In May of this year, at a town hall event in Euclid, Ohio outside of Cleveland (as is everywhere in the world, except Cleveland), a woman stood and stated "We have a president right now who is operating outside the structure of our Constitution, and I do agree he should be tried for treason."   The candidate's response:  "As I'm sure you do, I happen to believe that the Constitution was not just brilliant, but probably inspired.  I believe the same thing about the Declaration of Independence."

Asked afterward by reporters if he agreed with the lady, Romney responded “No, of course not.” Queried by CNN, he replied “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me. Obviously, I don’t agree that he should be tried.”

Glad we got that cleared up.   The fellow who would go on to become the GOP nominee for President believes the incumbent should not be tried for aiding and abetting the enemy.   Bold of him to say so.

Still, Romney's sense of decency exceeds that of one of his party's sitting United States Senators, Scott Brown of Massachusetts.   During one of the Senator's rallies earlier this week, supporters chanted (video way below) what are described as "Indian war whoops" and Tomahawk chops to ridicule challenger Elizabeth Warren's contention that she is 1/32 American Indian or Alaska Native/ Native American/ Indigenous Person.

But these were no ordinary supporters.   The group included a Republican operative as well as Brown's Deputy Chief of Staff, Constituent Service Counsel, Special Assistant, and the State Director of his Boston office.  Caught with his pants figuratively down, the junior Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts remarked "It is certainly something that I don't condone.   The real offense is that (Warren) said she was white and then checked the box saying she is Native American, and then she changed her profile in the law directory once she made her tenure."

So the Senator says that he doesn't condone what he then went on to say is in response to a grievous act by his opponent.

Try it yourself.   Have someone accuse you of two inappropriate acts- one which you regret and one which you don't, but both of which you know the other individual knows is wrong.    In the first instance, you will reply "I am sorry for..." or "I regret that..." or "I don't condone."  In the second instance, your impulse will be to add the word "certainly," as if to say "Yes, I got it, you don't like it."

If Brown didn't condone it, one or more of his staffers would be fired for the display of ethnic bigotry Scott Brown obviously condones.   Instead, attempting to justify the behavior, he shifts the issue to his opponent.   "I don't condone it," Brown says, "but Warren deserved it."

The true measure of the depths to which the Gas and Oil Party has sunk is not the feeble, somewhat cowardly response of a Mitt Romney, who has inadvertently conceded he is not qualified to be President.   It is, rather, the acceptance- nay, support- for prejudice publicly offered by a sitting Senator desperate to be re-elected.















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