After what seemed like a decade of 24/7 coverage of the Republican 2012 primary process, news has come out that there are still untold stories.  Apparently, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum negotiated to team up against Mitt Romney.  Ok, this doesn’t sound like a one meeting kind of thing.  It sounds like something that happened over a much longer period of time and something the political press, who are supposed to be “experts” would have picked up on. (And I am not talking about locals who may not cover politics all the time but the national reporters who do.)

Well, the nation was spared such a spectacularly awesome scary ticket because neither man would accept the veep slot. Phew, and the GOP thought the worst thing they had to fear last year was candidates who like to prattle on about “legitimate rape” and whatnot. (As a satire writer, I would have LOVED a GOP ticket with Newt & Santorum, LOVED IT.)

Of course, the other news that probably won’t actually come out (sorry, I cannot think of a better way to put that right now) is that Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) was NOT asked to take the veep slot for Romney because his son is gay.  Portman was a Romney surrogate and the two men spent a lot of time together. The irony is he had a better shot of picking up a state with Portman than Paul Ryan. I have a hard time seeing Romney ever getting Wisconsin.  Yes, I know people don’t base their pick on the VP candidate.  I guess someone if picked Ted Bundy after he was convicted of being a serial killer it would have turned more than a few people off…  Can you imagine the tagline for that campaign?  Smith/Bundy — because no one knows  more about preventing crime than a convicted serial killer!  (Ps.  I am sure some people were also turned off from John McCain because of Sarah Palin but not enough to swing a state or the election.  Note to any GOP readers:  I am NOT implying any Republican would pick Bundy for anything, ever.)

But I digress.

The GOP has been in overdrive trying to “rebrand” themselves.  I was especially impressed with their chairman, Reince Priebus, this morning.  He was asked if they planned to cut Portman’s national funding off now that he has endorsed same sex marriage.  “Of course not!” Priebus said with a fair amount of moral indignation because of course his decision to not defund Portman is the right thing to do based on current polling numbers that show increasing support for marriage equality.

At the Conservative Union conference last weekend, better known as CPAC, there was a session entitled “How do we look less racist?”  My response to the question was “How about you just BE less racist?”  My advice to the GOP is that superficial changes to messaging materials isn’t enough to convince people you care about their issues.  Priebus deserves some credit for starting to reach out to groups that have not either always or recently been the GOP base.

Getting people to believe you care about the things that matters to them requires you understand what those things are.  Reaching out to talk to them may not get you all the way there but it is a start.  Let’s hope the change Priebus is pushing is part of a long term approach and not a policy du jour.

Subscribe

's feed

Enter email below:

It’ll be tough to hear this, I know, but Mitt and Ann Romney are still confused, bitter and just plain sick-to-death over the fact that they’re not in the White House right now. I mean, when you pay for something — whether it be goods or services — you’re supposed to receive it. That’s how the system works. It’s certainly the way it’s always worked for the Romneys in the past. It’s what makes this nation great, dammit, and if you make a deal with the country that involves spending millions of dollars for the presidency of the United States, then the country reneges on that deal, what results is anarchy. How can rich people ever trust the value of their money and privilege again?

I have no doubt you’ve missed the Romneys since the destiny Mitt had been promised since birth slammed headlong into the ugly reality of what the American people actually wanted. If Mitt Romney’s lightning-fast exile to historical oblivion shocked you, trust me, it shocked Mitt, Ann and the rest of their family even more. Ann had already decided between “Chamois” and “Chesapeake Sunset” from the Ralph Lauren paint collection for the White House Family Dining Room and had commissioned a to-scale mock-up of the bedroom closets so she’d know how best to arrange the sweater sets and magic underwear for the next four years; Mitt had booked Taylor Hicks to play the inauguration; and Tagg, I’m sure, had fully worked out the “First Son” pick-up line most likely to get him to that sweet spot between first and second base with the BYU co-eds who’d be crowding him during speaking engagements. In the end, though, all of it was for nothing — and now the Romneys are talking about what went wrong in the weeks and months leading up to what sure as hell seems like the one and only time they’ve been denied something they wanted.

Unfortunately, they still have no idea. Oh, they think they know what went wrong, but the reality is that they remain entirely oblivious to the real reasons the American voters didn’t choose Mitt Romney over Barack Obama last year. And the irony is, it’s this arrogant bewilderment that answers the very questions they’re asking about why they lost.

Yesterday, Fox News aired the first full-length interview with Mitt and Ann Romney since the pummeling Mitt took back in November. It was clear right out of the gate that Chris Wallace’s sit-down would be merely the first stop on the 2013 Romney Rehabilitation Tour, a return to the public eye most Americans are waiting for with all the excited anticipation of a sequel to the Bee-Gees-and-Frampton Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band movie. Mitt Romney’s going to be making an appearance at CPAC — seriously the last place you’d ever expect to see him, considering the way his campaign was regarded through most of the 2012 race — and beyond that I’m sure he’ll be popping up here and there, likely trying to gain some kind of foothold in Republican politics moving forward despite the fact that I can’t think of one person who’d be happy to hear a word out of his mouth these days.

During the interview, Mitt Romney confessed that it “kills” him not to be sitting in the White House right now, doing the work he believes he could do to make the country better. He says that Barack Obama is still campaigning rather than governing and therefore, on issues like the sequester, he’s failed the American people and is driving the political sides farther apart rather than uniting them. He admits that his infamous comments about “the 47%” damaged his campaign incalculably, but he argues that the issue wasn’t that he expressed a grotesque, sneering plutocrat’s vision of the country and its people but that his words were simply taken the wrong way because he was caught in an unguarded moment. “What I said is not what I believe,” Romney told Wallace, unwittingly summing up exactly why voters didn’t like him: because of the sheer audacity of his dishonesty and willingness to morph into anything necessary at any given moment as long as it would help him get to the White House.

Ironically given the perception of her husband as a cipher, Ann Romney claims that the problem — the reason for the election day drubbing — was that voters were never able to “really get to know Mitt for who he was.” She also, predictably, says that she’s “happy to blame the media” for supposedly casting her husband in a bad light. Ann insists that the press was always in the tank for Obama and that this opinion is “pretty universally felt.”

And there’s your problem tied up in a nice little bow, right there.

The Romneys see the media being worshipful of Barack Obama as a universal truth only because their universe is so incredibly small. Their entire campaign took place inside a bubble generated by Fox News and the rest of the conservative entertainment complex. In that bubble, everybody thought Barack Obama was ruining the country and it was therefore a given that he’d lose and Romney would win in November. Romney and Co. were positively shellshocked by the outcome of the race because they simply weren’t living in the same reality as the rest of us. Theirs was informed by the bullshit proclamations of Dick Morris and relied upon the “unskewed” prognostications of Dean Chambers. They were happily draining a 24/7 IV drip of pure Kool-Aid.

That’s not necessarily offensive, just stupid. What is offensive, though, is that to this day the Romneys refuse to accept that the American people decided what they wanted, and it just wasn’t them. They can’t fathom the possibility that we did know what they were all about and really didn’t like it. I’m not expecting Mitt and Ann to look right into a camera and say, “Yeah, we suck; we get it.” But the lack of grace, the imperiousness conveyed by a flat-out refusal to say that the voters had their say and the opposition deserves credit, and, again, the arrogant obliviousness is just mind-boggling.

And it once again reminds us how we dodged one hell of a bullet by making sure Mitt Romney will be little more than a trivial cultural footnote, rather than the historical titan he was sure he would be.

Subscribe

Chez Pazienza's feed

Enter email below:

If you are interested in politics, you know that former senator from Nebraska, Chuck Hagel, was pretty much cannibalized by Congress. This is the problem with absolutism. You might agree with Barry Goldwater when he said, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

Perhaps not.  Perhaps we need to remember that our electeds represent us — in theory — the opposite of what is said is equally as valid.  Modernization is no vice and strict adherence to an ideology is no virtue.  I have grown up a lot since moving to Washington.

So we are this random space in time, to me — as a Democrat, I am not used to seeing such discord on the the other side. Republicans oppose Chuck Hagel”s nomination to be the next Secretary of Defense.  They have some real issues, some personal (looking at you, John McCain) and some policy oriented (hello there, Lindsay Graham).

I talk about this all the time.  Politics SHOULD end at our borders.  It doesn’t.  And as a liberal Democrat, my views on this may be meaningless.  And then my partisanship will leap out at you – Sarah Palin had no business talking smack about the country she claims to love. (For the record, I do believe she loves America.)

But really? We cannot even acknowledge good ideas if they come from a party to which we do not belong?

Subscribe

Chez Pazienza's feed

Enter email below:

15-year-old Jadin Bell hanged himself after students bullied him for being gay.

One of the more successful things about Mitt Romney’s doomed 2012 campaign was his ability to portray himself as an aw-shucks clean-cut good guy; a Mormon who never drinks or smokes or uses profanity, and quite literally uses the word “gosh” in every day language. But just beneath the thin Ward Cleaver veneer is a sociopath who’s incapable of experiencing certain moral and emotional connections to fellow humans.

He possesses the cold, animatronic mind of a CEO. Like so many other men in similar posts, he was able to fire thousands of people without flinching while also raiding and busting-out unsuspecting business after unsuspecting business. This T-1000 Terminator mindset was also evident in his youth, especially when he and his buddies assaulted a student who they thought was gay. Romney pinned John Lauber to the ground and, while the boy screamed out for help, the future Republican nominee for president cut his hair with a pair of scissors.

The immorality of what he did probably never occurred to Romney, as it never occurred to him that his corporate raider business model helped him to earn his fortune on the backs of countless destroyed lives. In schools all across the country, LGBT kids continue to be harassed and terrorized. Just yesterday, a 15-year-old boy named Jadin Bell was removed from life support after doctors informed his  family that he was brain dead. Jadin had tried to commit suicide by hanging himself from a jungle gym at a local schoolyard after being mercilessly bullied for being openly gay. Jadin’s mother told the press, “We always knew that Jadin is a special person. Now everyone knows.”

Bill Maher once joked that homosexuality can’t possibly be a choice because why would any teenager choose to get the shit kicked out of him by cruel thoughtless meatheads (like Romney and too many others)?

So it goes with a reintroduced Tennessee law, SB 234, also known as the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill. The law would mandate that teachers and school officials inform parents if their child exhibits LGBT behavior. In fact, the author of the legislation, State Sen. Stacey Campfield (R-Of Course), referred to the students as being “at risk” for homosexual behavior, not unlike being “at risk” for obesity or alcoholism.

Anyone with half-a-brain can grasp the horrific implications of such a draconian law. Obviously, many teens who suspect they might be gay tend to shy away from informing their parents, and especially other kids, for fear of being rejected by their families and bullied at school. Oftentimes, as Jadin Bell did, LGBT teens will seek out the help and protection of school counselors if they’re being accosted and hectored, but the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill would effectively cut off this one last place of refuge as many students would fear that by seeking help they’d actually end up being prematurely outted to their parents. And so the targets on their backs would grow larger as they become even more vulnerable to brutal attacks from other students.

ThinkProgress reported that 40 percent of all homeless teens are LGBT. I’m sure you can guess the primary reason: they’re afraid to come out to their parents, either because they’re ashamed of their sexuality or because their parents would abuse or reject them. Perhaps a little of both in some cases. And now there’s a law in Tennessee that would force more and more LGBT teens underground, living as pariahs in a world that treats their natural sexual orientation as criminal behavior sanctionable by schools and reportable to parents, not unlike cheating on a test or bringing a gun to school.

One of the worst things about this law is that, as David Frum implied, it’s a reaction to the fact that Republicans appear to be losing the so-called culture wars. They can’t seem to hold back the tide of marriage equality so they’re reaching for low-hanging fruit: kids. By the way, this is the same Republican Party which, when it’s not attacking children, bitches and screeches about “nanny-state” politics. Republicans are against healthier food choices in schools because it’s another example of tyrannical Food Nazi Michelle Obama smacking tater-tots and sugary sodas out of the mouths of children. But they’re okay with schools becoming anti-gay shark tanks where everyone is on the lookout for evil homosexual behavior, and, for LGBT kids, everyone becomes a potential enemy.

Too many Republicans still believe they can cure homosexuality. In this case, I suppose they think that by outting these kids, parents and schools will talk/threaten/cure/exorcise the gay away before it’s too late. Of course this is as ridiculous as the notion of having more guns in schools. Good kids who just want to be accepted for who they are will be utterly cut down in the process.

To that point, what happens next? We could ask Jadin Bell or Matthew Shepard, but sadly they’re not with us today. For LGBT teens, if this bill is passed, it’ll be more depression, more homelessness, more unchecked bullying and more suicides.

Subscribe

Bob Cesca's feed

Enter email below:

President Obama: Outreach to the wealthy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Barack Obama has been busy cozying up to big business in the wake of his electoral victory in November, trying to mend fractured relations that saw Wall St and big industry put most of their money into Mitt Romney’s campaign. “I am passionately rooting for your success,” Obama said to a group of business leaders last week at a question-and-answer session at the Business Roundtable in Washington.

It’s slightly nauseating to watch Obama begging the business community for acceptance, but given the extraordinary hatred he has been subjected to by America’s wealthiest citizens, it’s not surprising. “You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world put a forty-seven-year-old guy that never worked a day in his life and made him in charge of the free world,” said Forbes 400 rich list member Leon Cooperman earlier this year. “Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied.” Cooperman, part of a Billionaire ‘Hate Club‘ saw Obama’s desire to see millionaires pay what they did under Bill Clinton as an affront to ‘wealth creators’ like himself and a turn towards socialism.

The poor relations between Obama and the mega wealthy is perplexing to say the least, given Obama has gone out of his way to ensure their needs have been well catered to. As Chrystia Freeland noted in a brilliant piece in the New Yorker in October of this year:

The growing antagonism of the super-wealthy toward Obama can seem mystifying, since Obama has served the rich quite well. His Administration supported the seven-hundred-billion-dollar TARP rescue package for Wall Street, and resisted calls from the Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and others on the left, to nationalize the big banks in exchange for that largesse. At the end of September, the S. & P. 500, the benchmark U.S. stock index, had rebounded to just 6.9 per cent below its all-time pre-crisis high, on October 9, 2007. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have found that ninety-three per cent of the gains during the 2009-10 recovery went to the top one per cent of earners. Those seated around the table at dinner with Al Gore had done even better: the top 0.01 per cent captured thirty-seven per cent of the total recovery pie, with a rebound in their incomes of more than twenty per cent, which amounted to an additional $4.2 million each.

The hatred felt from elites towards Obama is the symptom of a very serious cultural problem that has infected America in recent times and made economic progress incredibly difficult. That cultural problem is one of ideology – the ardent faith in markets that promotes self interest and greed as the main driving force behind economic growth. This makes reality increasingly difficult for people to understand as everything is always seen through the lenses of a predefined set of beliefs.

It is almost difficult to understand economic realities through the prism of ideology. From Marxism to Capitalism, ideologies set out the world as it should be – a socialistic paradise where mutualism and group solidarity increases productivity, or a individualistic utopia where self interest creates enormous material wealth for everyone. The problem is, human societies are far too complicated and erratic to responded docilely to imposed ideological structures, and understanding economic activity within them is as much an art as it is a science.

The Ayn Rand self interest model has been adopted by the economic elite for a simple reason; it justifies their position in society. Not only do they get to be wealthy beyond comprehension, they also get to be the saviors of society. It does not matter that much of their wealth has been built off the back of government investment and protection, and it does not matter that their continued existence is the result of a gigantic public bailout that propped up a crumbling system that was about to take down the entire global economy down.

To hedge fund billionaires like Cooperman, the wealthy are wealthy because they work harder than everyone else, and any attempt to get them to pay their fair share of taxes is akin to theft.

The problem with this model of self interest is that it completely discounts externalities that have disastrous effects on society. While Cooperman is raking in billions of dollars through his hedge fund, he pays no attention to the social havoc his investments can cause. Take for example, the debt crisis in Greece. Hedge funds have long been buying up Greek bonds at discount rates hoping to see a huge return for their buy-low-sell-high strategy. The problem is, as part of the EU bailout package, investors are being asked to take a hit along with the Greek public, and they won’t accept it, betting they will be able to suck up a big portion of the bailout money if they hold out. While poverty spirals out of control in Greece, the general population has little control over the bailout deal their government negotiates. But hedge fund managers do, and they are continuing to squeeze Greece in order to make their billions. Traditionally, if you make an investment and it doesn’t work out, you lose your money. But if you’re on Wall St, the government is there to ensure you make your money regardless of how bad an investment it was, and how badly it affects the people involved.

This is one small example, but every industry on the planet has some adverse effect on society in some way, and given the nature of many businesses, if left unchecked their behavior would be catastrophic for society (and in the case of Wall St, it already is). That’s why we have regulation, safety standards, and workers rights, because maximizing self interest doesn’t always create the best results for society in general. That’s not to say that a degree of self interest isn’t a good thing, it clearly is as there are many benefits to an incentivized market system, but it should not be the only principle guiding the way we organize our society.

President Obama has tried to argue for a shift away from the culture of pure self interest without ruffling too many feathers. He proposals to bring taxation in line with the Clinton era is hardly dramatic, yet Wall St and big business have reacted with exceptional viciousness. Obama is again going back to them and offering more concession – stroking their egos and begging for acceptance. As Zeke Miller writes in Buzzfeed:

Robert Wolf, a friend, bundler, and adviser to Obama and the former Chairman of UBS Americas, said the relationship between the business community and the White House is more robust now than at any point in the Obama presidency…..

Wolf said he is optimistic [on the new relationship between the Administration and big business].

“They’re not just talking fiscal cliff, they are talking about ways to make the us more competitive going into 2013 — things like immigration, education, corporate tax reform, and tax policy that the president is making a priority,” said Wolf. “They actually align very well with what the private sector wants to participate it.”

This type of deal making may be a political necessity for Obama going forward, but there’s one thing we can be sure of; it won’t be good for the American public.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Dick Morris: Never right

If anyone could legitimately tell me what purpose Dick Morris serves, I’d gladly turn The Daily Banter into a propaganda wing of the Republican Party and join Dick in the fight against evil socialism in America. Apparently, Morris is a political pollster, consultant, and media pundit, but given he has been spectacularly wrong about, well, everything related to politics, it’s hard to see why anyone would hire him. But no matter how badly Dick screws up, he’s always there reeling off predictions and giving his analysis on the latest political issue of the day. In Dick’s world, Republicans will always win and Democrats will always lose, and Barack Obama is always moments away from resigning from his Presidency.

It seems there are limits to how wrong you can be, and Morris, having pushed them to the very end has finally felt the consequences of not getting anything right. Fox News got tired of his limitless wrongness and took him off the air along with his partner in crime, fellow propagandist Karl Rove.

The last straw was probably Morris’s prediction that Mitt Romney would ‘Win by a landslide’ in the general election, a prediction that was not only incorrect, but completely the opposite of what happened. Morris explained in a blog post that he was a ‘pollster, not a meteorologist!’, and he was wrong because Hurricane Sandy saved the President from the previously inevitable Dick Morris backed proposition that ‘there is no chance Obama will get re-elected’. Wrote Morris:

There was no good national polling after Sandy struck. Gallup, for example, suspended its polling. At the last minute, it put together a national sample — with lots of disclaimers about the dangers of inaccuracies due to the difficulty of sampling storm-hit areas — and it showed a slight Romney lead.

Romney was, in fact, leading before Sandy and that his chances blew away in the storm with its famous bipartisan photo of Governor Chris Christie with Obama. And there was no way to measure the impact of Sandy since there could not logistically be any polling. Why was I wrong? I’m a pollster, not a meteorologist!

Never mind the fact that the Obama team had long sewn up the electoral college by running one of the most sophisticated campaigns in history, and unleashed an incredibly powerful ‘get out the vote’ ground game on election day that made Romney’s campaign look like a Communist run shopping mall.

But none of that bothers Dick, and he is still hammering away on his blog, no doubt analyzing the political landscape and envisioning dream match ups he could write books about (Morris brilliantly predicted Hillary Clinton would face off against Condoleeza Rice in 2008, and even wrote a book about it).

It is with a heavy heart though, that I write this, as covering Dick’s failed predictions in the mainstream media has been great fun, and I won’t be checking in on his blog all that much (running this one takes up most of my time anyway), so I thought I’d compile a list of Dick’s best work.

Here are the 5 dumbest predictions Dick Morris has made in recent times, most of them pertaining to the Republican’s chances of knocking Obama off his perch – a fact Dick was absolutely certain about.

1. Donald Trump will run for President and could beat Obama. Said Morris on The Mike Gallagher Show:

“Oh I am. I am. I take him very seriously. I think he’s going to run, I think he’s got a good shot at the nomination, and I think if he were nominated, he could beat Obama”.

Reality: Trump didn’t run for President.

2. Michele Bachmann will wing Iowa. Said Morris on Fox News:

 ”Bachmann Is Probably Going To Win”

Reality: Michele Bachmann came 6th in Iowa.

3. Obama won’t run for re-election. Wrote Morris on The Hill:

The kind of enthusiasm Obama kindled in 2008 cannot be ignited easily by negative appeals. Particularly if the Republicans nominate a more moderate candidate such as Mitt Romney, Obama will not be able to rely on partisan animosity to succeed where job approval has failed. And, given all that, he might not even run.

Reality: President Obama did run for re-election.

4. Obama has no chance of getting re-elected. Said Morris to Sean Hannity:

“There Is No Chance That Obama Will Get Re-elected…..Zilch, none, zip, nada”

Reality: President Obama was re-elected.

5. Romney will beat Obama by a landslide. Said Morris on Fox News Sunday:

“Romney will win by a very large margin – a landslide if you will.”

Reality: President Obama beat Romney by a very large margin, particularly in the electoral college. A landslide if you will.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Glenn Greenwald: Always right. At least in his mind

By Ben Cohen: I’ve received quite a few emails and comments about my piece on Glenn Greenwald’s rant on the progressive media last week. Some readers took exception to my position that Greenwald’s rhetoric is unhelpful and counter productive, claiming my attack on him was pointless and without substance. The most concise criticism came reader Steve Rice who wrote:

The progressive blogosphere is already bursting at the seams with people who do nothing but rant about Republicans all day. Greenwald has different priorities. Yes, his focus is somewhat narrow, but that’s always been the case. If you read him, you know what you’re getting into. Given that, I fail to see the point of this article, aside from getting easy page-views from the anti-Greenwald brigade. It’s the same vague pseudo-criticism you’ve leveled at him before and you admit yourself that it has little to do with the substance of his work. So why write about Glenn Greenwald?

I’m unsure how my piece on Monday consists of ‘vague pseudo-criticism’ given I was quite explicit about what I was attacking Greenwald on. As the reader says, I don’t have a problem with the substance of Greenwald’s work, I have a problem with the tone of it and his relentless attacks on other media outlets and writers who do not follow Greenwald’s specific editorial agenda. Perhaps Bob Cesca does a better job of what I was trying to articulate. He wrote about Greenwald’s attack on MSNBC and other progressive outlets:

This new Greenwald rant is a continuation of his ongoing crusade to badger progressives who don’t make it part of their daily routine to screech at the president regarding Greenwald’s preordained three or four pet issues. Greenwald operates under the mandate that because drones are his primary concern and the prism through which he evaluates the president, so it should be with everyone else. The slightest deviation from that narrative in lieu of delivering news of a presidential success is a punishment-worthy trespass.

Greenwald has a long and storied history of extreme pettiness when it comes to dealing with other progressives, going as far as claiming Obama supporters would stand by him if he raped a nun on live television. When a blogger named “DrDawg” tweeted about Imani Gandy: “Obama could rape a nun live on NBC and you’d say we weren’t seeing what we were seeing,” Greenwald felt the need to add: “No – she’d say it was justified and noble – that he only did it to teach us about the evils of rape.” (pic of the exchange below):

Greenwald was probably being sarcastic (and trying to be funny), but the exchange was spiteful and unnecessary – particularly given it was directed towards a woman. Rape isn’t exactly a topic you make jokes about. And instead of apologize when lambasted by much of the blogosphere, Greenwald tweeted that Obama supporters would defend him in the face of “ANY evil: assassinations, child-killings: EVEN rape violent crime like rape.” Of course in Greenwald’s world, he can never be wrong, so an apology was completely out of the question.

This type of rhetoric is extremely counterproductive for a number of reasons. Firstly, you can be a supporter of any political figure, Republican or Democrat, without explicitly endorsing everything they do. I have many Republican friends who voted for both George Bush and Mitt Romney and I would never level that type of hostility towards them. Yes, I think Bush and Romney are backwards thinking dinosaurs who have spent their entire careers lining the pockets of the wealthy and cheer leading wars in the Middle East, but I don’t hold my friends accountable for their actions. Going after political leaders is one thing, but relentlessly attacking their supporters is something completely different. You can have a civilized debate with those who disagree with you without insinuating they support rape and child murder.

Secondly, Greenwald’s vindictiveness and tone detracts from the often excellent points he makes. I wrote about this in my article on Monday, but it’s worth repeating: Greenwald is a very good journalist and he does important work. He’s just limiting himself by behaving like a smug spelling bee champion.

I wrote a story on Greenwald’s excessive smugness and pettiness a few months back on these pages, and I’m guessing as a result, I have been blocked from following Glenn on Twitter (and I’m sure if he reads this, he’ll respond with something even smugger like “I don’t know who Ben Cohen is….”). My twitter account is open for anyone to follow, and as long as they are not abusive towards me, I don’t mind debating them. Greenwald apparently sees the twittersphere as a playground where he gets to pick on people he doesn’t like and block those who politely disagree with him.

Going after Glenn Greenwald isn’t an ‘easy-page views’ endeavor either. As the reader rightly points out, ranting about Republicans is quite the rage these days and people do tend to tune into scathing pieces about the latest Republican insanity more than debates between left wing political commentators. I’m going after Greenwald because he’s behaving like a spoiled child and should stop hurling bombs at people who don’t believe he is the be all and end all of progressive politics.

And just to show you this is nothing personal, I’m going to end this piece with a link to Greenwald’s excellent piece on massive US and Israeli hypocrisy in the Middle East. It’s well worth a read, regardless of what you might think of him.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Mitt Romney: Not a model for future Republican candidates.

I’m not sure how I missed this incredible gem, but if you want to understand why the Republicans lost the election this year, look no further than Stuart Steven’s astonishing article in The Washington Post last week. In probably the best example of the fantasy thinking that has plagued the Republican Party Stevens argues that contrary to popular opinion, voters actually really liked Romney, and by some creative number analysis, he really beat Obama when it came to the votes of true Americans. Here he is on Romney’s shining personality:

I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.’s Green Room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians. That’s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought he would win the nomination… Nobody liked Romney except voters.

This is despite Romney having the lowest personal approval ratings for a presumptive presidential nominee dating back to 1948. Steven’s also argued that although Romney lost, he actually beat Obama because he got more votes from the middle classes:

Let’s remember that any party that captures the majority of the middle class must be doing something right. When Mitt Romney stood on stage with President Obama, it wasn’t about television ads or whiz-bang turnout technologies, it was about fundamental Republican ideas vs. fundamental Democratic ideas. It was about lower taxes or higher taxes, less government or more government, more freedom or less freedom. And Republican ideals — Mitt Romney — carried the day.

That is of course because poor Americans don’t actually count as voters – a point made clear by Romney in his 47% speech to a room full of rich people.

Interestingly, Stevens also thinks that the campaign Romney ran should serve as a template for the future as Obama only won because he had the charisma and money to get minorities to vote:

There was a time not so long ago when the problems of the Democratic Party revolved around being too liberal and too dependent on minorities. Obama turned those problems into advantages and rode that strategy to victory. But he was a charismatic African American president with a billion dollars, no primary and media that often felt morally conflicted about being critical. How easy is that to replicate?

In reality, Obama won because campaign strategist David Axelrod insisted on fighting an extremely smart campaign that focused on key battle grounds to take the electoral college. Yes, Obama’s appeal to minorities was an important factor, but most importantly, his re-election team understood that the Republicans were woefully unprepared on the ground in key states and ran sophisticated operations to drive the vote out and smash Romney with negative ads.

Republicans lost because as one Romney aide discovered after listening to David Axelrod’s postmortem of the debate at a Harvard conference last week, “We weren’t even running in the same race.”

But if Republicans want to take Stevens’ analysis of what happened, they should go right ahead. They just won’t win any more elections going forward.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

By Ben Cohen: In an incredibly long winded and monotonous rant on his Guardian blog Glenn Greenwald lambasts the progressive media for making hollow promises to hold President Obama more accountable after beating Mitt Romney in the general election. Greenwald makes some interesting and valid points, but the lecturing aggressiveness is unbelievably tiring to say the least.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Glenn Greenwald is an exceptional journalist who has done an enormous amount of good on issues pertaining to civil liberties in the US. His work is well substantiated, cogently argued and often powerfully written making his contribution to the national dialogue extremely important. But Greenwald makes himself completely inaccessible to the very people he should be trying to reach if he wants to have real impact, and confines himself to the self congratulating rantosphere alongside fellow ideologues like Jane Hamsher and the rest of the FireDogLake bloggers.

Here’s Greenwald on the progressive media that he argues blindly follows President Obama regardless of the ethical implications:

As for the vow that media progressives will now criticize Obama more and hold him more accountable, permit me to say that I simply do not believe this will happen. This is not because I think those who are taking this vow are being dishonest – they may very well have convinced themselves that they mean it – but because the rationalization they have explicitly adopted and vigorously advocated precludes any change in behavior.

Over the past four years, they have justified their supine, obsequious posture toward the nation’s most powerful political official by appealing to the imperatives of electoral politics: namely, it’s vital to support rather than undermine Obama so as to not help Republicans win elections. Why won’t that same mindset operate now to suppress criticisms of the Democratic leader?

I don’t necessarily find fault with Greewald’s argument here – he is provably right that the mainstream progressive media failed to draw attention to serious civil rights and foreign policy issues leading up to the election, but his relentless hounding of the left wing media and wild generalizations about their aims says more about him than anything else. Greenwald believes that the Left wing media is guilty by omission – they don’t overtly criticize Obama’s foreign policies or civil rights abuses, so therefore they must support them. The logic is completely ridiculous given Greenwald could be found guilty of supporting Republicans using the same line of thinking. Greenwald (very) occasionally writes about Republicans and the right wing media, but spends most of his time attacking the hypocrisy of the Democrats and the left wing media. All well and good. He has the right to do that, and I don’t think the lack of attention he pays to the Republicans means he supports their agenda. But the same goes for left leaning publications and media figures. Just because many of them choose to focus their attentions on the dangers posed by the Republican Party does not mean they explicitly support drone killings or Obama’s policies towards the Palestinians.

Generally speaking, I am supportive of President Obama and have written extensively on why it is crucial he remains in office. I believe the threat posed by the Republican Party is extreme, both from a domestic and foreign policy point of view. I won’t go into detail, but I think there is a strong argument to made that the Democratic Party is the only institution left protecting the country from complete capitulation to corporate interests and the military industrial complex, and must be kept in power in order to preserve what is left of functioning government. That does not mean that I support the President and the Democrats when it comes to their ties to Wall St, his acquiescence to the military chiefs, the use of drones, the signing of the NDAA or the unconditional support of Israel. I don’t specialize in civil rights issues or international law, so don’t spend massive amounts of time writing about them. I have particular interests that I like to cover, and I won’t try to pretend to my readers that I am an expert on issues I haven’t researched thoroughly. This doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions on those issues, I just don’t tend to cover them as much. I do regularly criticize Obama on Israel and the economy, because those are topics are have a particular interest in. That’s my business and I don’t expect everyone to share my interests or take on them.

The problem with Greenwald is that just because he believes Obama’s failings on civil liberties issues and the sorry state of the American media are the most important topics on the planet, everyone else has to agree with him.

Objectively speaking, both mine and Greenwald’s interests are small fry in comparison to environmental issues. Obama’s use of drones and the treatment of Bradley Manning in prison aren’t exactly pressing when compared to the wholesale destruction of vital life sustaining eco systems and the rapid heating of the planet. I’m sure Greenwald cares about these issues, as I do, but probably isn’t as interested in them as he is his own pet topics. And just because we don’t write about them doesn’t mean we don’t feel they are incredibly important.

Personally, I see Greenwald’s excessive ranting against the President and other progressives as counterproductive, not because he’s wrong, but because it gets harder and harder to listen to him.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Daily Banter Mailbag! Today, Bob, Ben and Chez discuss voter suppression, the worst GOP candidates and the War on Christmas.

The questions:

1) Are you at all surprised that Republicans are finally admitting they tried to keep blacks and other minorities from voting in the presidential election and what do you think the admission will mean for them next time around?
– Tracy

Bob: Not a bit. Jim Greer confirmed what we’ve all been talking about. I wrote a column here about what needs to happen next. Specifically, our national elections should be federalized. The FEC ought to standardize the operation and regulation of any election that involves federal posts. The states, and chiefly the states with Republican governments, have abused the privilege of conducting our most sacred civic duty and now we need to take the toys away.

Chez: I’m somewhat surprised but I think the reason for it answers your second question. I honestly can’t see them changing tactics next time and I think some are offering up this little confession with the knowledge that it’s not going to change a thing. It’s a stupid, arrogant gambit, but I also can’t be entirely sure they’re not right in assuming that they’ll figure out a way to get away with it regardless of whether people actually know it’s happening. If they have enough people in office at the state level, although they weren’t fully successful this past election, they might be able to pull it off over the next couple of years. One thing’s for sure: they will not stop. They have to eliminate the power of that voting bloc to stay politically viable so look for more underhanded schemes aimed at doing so.

Ben: I’ll be honest – I don’t really know what to make of it, so to a degree it was surprising. It’s a good thing that some of them have owned up to doing something terrible, and I guess you can kind of call that progress. However, unless the GOP radically changes its political platform it has no choice other than to engage in voter suppression if they want to win. They are facing a serious demographic nightmare going forward as the country changes its ethnic make up, so stopping minorities from voting is the only thing they can do. If they continue to have anti immigrant, intolerant policies that only appeal to angry white males, we’ll continue to see voter suppression. So the admission doesn’t really mean anything for next time around.

2) Who was the lesser presidential candidate, John McCain or Mitt Romney?
– Frederic

Bob: Wow. That’s a great question. I’d have to go with Romney because at least McCain had some integrity buried down there somewhere. Then again, he almost foisted Sarah Palin onto the national stage and potentially a heartbeat away from the presidency, so that draws McCain down by many, many notches. And still, Romney was far worse.

Ben: That’s an interesting question Frederic. As a political candidate, Romney was considerably worse. He ran a spectacularly pathetic campaign through the primaries and the general election that only worked because the Republicans threw so much cash at him. Romney did have his moments (the first debate being his finest hour) but he made so many stupid mistakes he will go down as one of the worst candidates that ever attempted to become President. However, I actually think he would have been more reasonable in office than McCain. The Arizona Senator is completely insane when it comes to foreign policy, and while Romney tried to play the hawk during the campaign, McCain genuinely is one. Romney may have talked about getting tough with China and Russia, but I get the feeling McCain would have had no qualms threatening them with real force. Also, the fact that McCain brought on Sarah Palin severely damaged his credibility as a serious leader, and while Romney would have brought in some ideologues, there’s no way he would have allowed anyone like Sarah Palin anywhere near his candidacy. So I guess it evens out at the end. Both were terrible.

Chez: I’ve said this before: Mitt Romney was the worst presidential candidate the GOP has nominated in my lifetime and may very well be the worst candidate at the worst possible time, period. It was shocking stupidity to try to run someone like Romney, but I admit that considering the clown car primary, Romney really was the only choice — the least of all possible evils besides maybe Huntsman, whom the Republicans were never gonna go for. That said, despite continuing to be a pompous, sneering plutocrat, Romney will likely disappear into oblivion where he belongs. McCain, on the other hand, has proven that he STILL can’t get over being beaten by Obama four years ago and has been on a vindictive tear ever since, making him one of the worst EX-presidential candidates we’ve ever seen.

3) How are you preparing for the War on Christmas? (Me and my family have gathered canned goods, flashlights, a first aid kit, and we cleared out space in the basement we can turn into a shelter.)
– Carl

Chez: Well, I guess it depends on which side you intend to be on. I, for one, have mounted specially modified anti-aircraft artillery on my roof armed with red nose-seeking surface to air missiles. Each one has “SEASON’S GREETINGS, BITCH” painted on the side of it. I’ve also stocked the freezer with a bunch of steaks made from the various animals I stole from the local living nativity scene and I plan to torch the giant Christmas tree over at the Grove here in L.A. and replace it with a large pyramid made entirely out of barely legal Asian porn DVDs. This is one war I aim to win.

Bob: I’m preparing for the War on Christmas by acting as a Trojan Horse. My beautifully decorated tree, my nightly holiday music, my total obsession with all things Christmas is merely a ploy to undermine the holiday. So watch out!

Ben: As an agnostic with Jewish and Christian heritage, I’m torn between three worlds making Christmas a very hard time for me. Part of me wants to join the atheists and denounce public displays of religion, the other part wants to kill Santa (after all, we topped Christ, so it makes sense we finish the job on Father Christmas), and the other wants to sing carols and eat turkey. Surely there’s some sort of Switzerland when it comes to the war on Christmas where you don’t have to take sides?

——

Got a question for the mailbag? Email us at TheDailyBanter@gmail.com!!!

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below: