Tag: chait

Mittmentum!

Mitt Romney in GOP debate: [Obama] didn’t create the recession, but he made it worse and longer.
Mitt Romney in NH on Monday: The people of New Hampshire have waited long enough. They want to see good jobs. They want to see rising incomes. They want to see an economy that’s growing again, and the president’s failed. He did not cause this recession, but he made it worse.
Mitt Romney when challenged on veracity of “worse”: I didn’t say that things are worse.

The Al Gore Problem

Dana Milbank: Romney has what might be called an Al Gore problem: Even if he’s being genuine, he seems ersatz. He assumed a professorial air by delivering a 25-page PowerPoint presentation in an amphitheater lecture hall – but the university issued a statement saying it had nothing to do with the event, for which the sponsoring college Republicans failed to fill all seats. His very appearance – a suit worn without a necktie – shouted equivocation. His hair was so slick that only a few strands defied the product.
Jon Chait: This is a perfect demonstration of an Al Gore problem, but I’d define the problem differently. An Al Gore problem is what happens when the media forms an impression of your character and decides to cram every irrelevant detail of your appearance and behavior into that frame, regardless of whether or not it means anything. Thus Romney’s hair and lack of tie are now evidence of a character flaw, as is his decision to give a detailed policy lecture in a university town without being officially sponsored by a University. An Al Gore problem results in the media ganging up on a candidate like cool kids mocking a geek, with literally everything he’s doing serving as more evidence for the predetermined narrative.
Lemkin: Indeed. I suppose it’s progress that some handful of journalists now see the pathology inherent in forcing everything into a pre-existing media frame come-what-may…and but also we can’t seem to make the media connection between “Clinton is a murderer, Clinton ran drugs out of the governors office, Gore said he invented the internet and etc…” and their modern-day exponents “Obama is from Kenya, Obama didn’t write his books, Obama’s school was paid for by shadowy Mid East backers, and etc…” It’s all the Lee Atwater style of politics, none of it is anything new, we just are forced to live in it Groundhog Day style, over and over and over again anytime a Democrat wins high office. The MSM, apparently, is not and never will be broadly aware of this.

If you look closely at [Bruce] Keough’s rationale [for leaving the Romney:2012 campaign], it’s absurd. he claims he wants someone attached to “a certain set of political ideals,” but the only evidence he supplies of Romney changing those compared to 2008 is that he’s talking more about the economy and appearing more frequently sans necktie.

Jonathan Chait. Perhaps Romney is privately attributing his previous problems to an overly tight necktie?
After all, as overlord, all will kneel trembling before Romney and obey his brutal commands. End communication.

…the most plausible deficit reduction plan is to rely on gridlock rather than cooperation. Obama yesterday held absolutely firm in his opposition to extending tax cuts on income over $250,000. If Obama won’t relent, then Republicans probably won’t relent on the rest of the tax cuts, and the whole thing will expire. And then, if Obama wins reelection, he’ll be most of the way toward a sustainable deficit, and the Republicans will have had their triumphalism beaten out of them. At that point, a deal to raise a little revenue by reforming the tax code plus spending restraint would be far more plausible.

Jonathan Chait, seemingly forgetting the part where Obama gets to campaign on the GOP eliminating tax cuts for the middle class because they weren’t getting tax cuts for the very richest of the rich. Who, you know, only destroyed the global economy and aren’t the most popular folks electorally. But by all means, GOP, campaign on an all fat-cat ticket. It’s working out great so far in the Midwest.

Oswald:Rumsfeld::Podhoretz:Dear Leader

Jonathan Chait: Right, if you imagine that the most important thing [Rumsfeld] did was a huge success rather than a huge failure, then he’s be remember [sic] as a huge success. Not as a huge failure. Likewise, if Lee Harvey Oswald had killed someone who was about to assassinate President Kennedy, rather than assassinating President Kennedy himself, he’d go down in history as a hero.
John Podhoretz: You can be sour about Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Defense Department all you like, and plenty of people are. But offering a cutesy analogy between Rumsfeld and Lee Harvey Oswald has lowered Chait to a base level of rhetorical crassness to which even his questionable standing as an exceptionally graceless writer and amazingly crude thinker had not yet fallen. Now it has. Congratulations.
Jonathan Chait: Podhoretz is betraying here a common confusion between comparisons and analogies. An analogy between A and B does not imply moral parity between A and B. So, for instance, the statement “John Podhoretz rules Commentary with the ruthless style of Kim Jong-il,” would be completely unfair. Kim Jong-il is responsible for the death and brutality of millions, whereas Podhoretz has only brutalized the English language. On the other hand, the statement, “John Podhoretz is to Norman Podhoretz and Kim Jong-il is to Kim il-Sung” would imply that John Podhoretz, like Kim Jong-il, acquired his job in nepotistic fashion and has performed miserably, without drawing any moral parallel between him and the North Korean dictator.

The Republicans are joining the Central Bank of China in criticizing [Fed Chairman] Ben Bernanke. This is really distressing to me. […] [complaints about currency manipulation from Chinese central bankers] is like being called silly by the Three Stooges.
And then to have Republican leaders in Congress [agree is] bizarre. The Republicans are arguing that the Fed should not even be concerned about unemployment.

Barney Frank, letting other Democrats see how it’s done. Now say it every day for a few months. On your one millionth repetition, when you can’t stand to say it again: you will have reached somebody for the very first time.
Source: tnr.com

Oh, I don’t know, maybe you should ASK

Former Half-Term Governor Sarah Palin: There’s nothing different today than there was in the last 43 years of my life since I first started reading. I continue to read all that I can get my hands on — and reading biographies of, yes, Thatcher for instance, and of course Reagan and the John Adams letters, and I’m just thinking of a couple that are on my bedside, I go back to C.S. Lewis for inspiration, there’s such a variety, because books have always been important in my life.
Jonathan Chait: Does anyone find this remotely believeable?
Lemkin: No, I do not, but unlike you and your brethren I don’t have access to ask her a (fucking) follow-up. Howsabout you pry ever-so-gently for a little plot information from “The Screwtape Letters” or for a particularly moving or trenchant letter from Adams? I know, I know: shrill. Sorry. But, honestly, it’s hard to tell just what journalists spend their time doing. That time certainly isn’t spent preparing.

Delusion, Failure, Recrimination

Jonathan Chait ably describes the Republican cycle:

The loop begins with Republicans gaining power on the basis of promising to cut unspecified programs, or perhaps programs accounting for a tiny proportion of the federal budget. That is the stage of the cycle we are currently in. Then Republicans obtain power and have to confront the fact that most spending programs are popular, and so they must choose between destroying their own popularity by taking on programs like Medicare, or failing to materially cut spending. So they settle on tax cuts instead of spending cuts. Then eventually their supporters conclude that they have been betrayed by their leaders, and cast about for new leaders with the willpower to really cut spending this time.

I’d add that even if they zeroed the entire non-defense discretionary budget they’d still be less than halfway to balance. And that’s before they formalize the permanent status of the Bush tax cuts and inevitably start adding in new tax cuts, which, of course, never have to be budgeted or paid for.

That the previous paragraph is news to most Americans is why the Democrats fail. And, just to name one, the elimination of the NIH and NSF through this zero budgeting process would basically doom the United States to second or third tier status in science, research, and development for decades, if not forever. So there’s that.

But let’s not talk details.

Delusion, Failure, Recrimination