Ya Gotta Admit, They're Good

From the people who built the Overton Window from hand-crafted glass, we have the sensible moderate conservative alternative.

On Fox News Sunday this morning, host Chris Wallace asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich about the controversy, noting that in 1991 Gingrich defended a similar speech by then-President George H.W. Bush by saying, “Why is it political for the president of the United States to discuss education?” Gingrich replied that if it’s “a totally positive speech” that parents can see “in advance” (which they can), then “it is good to have”:

GINGRICH: My daughter Jackie Cushman just wrote a column in which she said, “if the president gives a speech as a parent to students to encourage them to learn and stay in school, it is a great thing for him to do.” It was a good thing for Ronald Reagan to do. It was a good thing for George H. W. Bush to do. And I’ve been communicating with Arne Duncan and the team at the Department of Education. I believe this is going to be posted, people are going to be able to see it in advance, it’s going to be a totally positive speech, and if that’s what it is, then it is good to have the president of the United States say to young people across America: Stay in school, study and do your homework. It’s good for you and it’s good for America.

First of all, Newt Gingrich's daughter writes columns. Maybe she should do a pundit road show with Bill Kristol, Meghan McCain, John Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Liz Cheney and Jenna Hager Bush about the dangers of affirmative action.

Second, here comes the sensible Newt Gingrich, riding in to denounce the hysteria and position himself as a serious, brave conservative who only concerns himself with real-world issues like the threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack and using lasers to wipe out North Korean missiles. Now we can make way for the parade of liberal DC columnists like Joke Line and Richard Cohen lauding the bravery of conservative heroes like Gingrich, boldly going against the attacks of his own party supporters. (Hey wait, here they are!) Maybe this will kick off his Presidential campaign in 2012, although he'll have to get past early adopter of the "Obama's education speech is fine" gambit, Joe Scarborough.

Being able to assert that it's OK for the President of the United States to give a "stay in school" speech to children is about the lowest bar anyone in politics will ever have to surmount. If that's evidence of conservative sanity, then whoever said "the soft bigotry of low expectations" was a genius. Now Gingrich and Scarborough and whoever else can get on with their attacks on Obama's government takeover of health care and efforts to make America vulnerable to Evil Terrorists. At least they aren't too crazy.

I'm reminded of the Chris Rock routine:

Niggas always want credit for some shit they supposed to do. A nigga will brag about some shit a normal man just does. A nigga will say some shit like, "I take care of my kids." You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker! What kind of ignorant shit is that? "I ain't never been to jail!" What do you want, a cookie?! You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!

Eyeballs Popping From Sockets

I think every post I write gets me angrier and angrier, so I may need to take a time out. But first:

Max Baucus spoke at the Academy Health National Policy Conference today. His first words were:

The 19th Century British philosopher Herbert Spencer wrote: “The preservation of health is a duty.”

I believe that this Congress has a duty to reform health care.

And he continued, "this morning, I’d like to spend some time talking about the potential obstacles we may face as we move forward – and the reasons why those barriers can be overcome." So his talk was a kind of analysis, setting out the barriers and how they can be surmounted.

The Washington Times watched that performance, listened to it, and wrote this.

A key Senate Democrat charged with overseeing his party's swift push for universal health care indicated on Tuesday that reform may have to wait until next year, as other priorities related to the economy and wars take precedent.

"Why might reform not happen this year? As is often the case, the new administration and the new Congress face competing priorities," said Sen. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat and Senate Finance Committee chairman, at a health policy conference in Washington hosted by AcademyHealth and Health Affairs magazine. "These priorities compete for time on the agenda and attention in the press and in public."

"The president's dance card is indeed full," he added.

Seriously, shoot me in the face.

These people are not too dumb to breathe, though it looks like it, but devious beyond all reason, ready to intentionally misinterpret anything to preserve the status quo. Do you want to know the very next sentence Baucus said? The RESPONSE to what he laid out?

Despite all of these competing demands, however, nothing seems to resonate with families more than the issue of health care.

We see the same thuddingly stupid, knowingly stupid tripe on the recovery package, with tired arguments about how government spending isn't economic stimulus (that's pretty much ALL it is) and how FDR didn't pull the country out of the Great Depression, relying on the rantings of discredited hack Amity Shlaes to simply lie to the public.

Now the Democrats aren't doing their job of selling this thing effectively, and it's jaw-dropping that they can't turn a fucking jobs program into a positive good. But make no mistake, they're swimming uphill. The media is standing in the way of anyone but their rich friends and neighbors from making it out of this economic disaster alive, and I'm totally sick of it. They are corporate toadies who are nothing short of treasonous.

I wouldn't call the Senate. I would call MSNBC, call CNN, call the New York Times, call ABC, call CBS, and tell them you are selling their stocks. We need to throw a Sinclair Broadcasting on their collective asses. They are doing more than hurting America this time. They are destroying it.

Morning Stunningly Superficial

It'd be a good rename for Morning Joe.

Scarborough: "You cannot blame what's going on in Israel on the Bush administration."

Brzezinski: "You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you."

Hysterical. And it gets better when JoeScar, his ego wounded, tries to use sarcasm, which really doesn't work on him. I think Zbig was about 10 seconds from asking Joey "What dead intern?" at the end there.

What Dead Intern, Joe?

I caught this yesterday, when Rachel Maddow brought up McCain's former Florida campaign co-chair Bob "I'm afraid of black guys in a public bathroom so I offered them $20 and a blow job" Allen, and Joey Scarborough lost it, actually walking off the set. I wasn't sure why he lost it until I remembered that Joey Scar was a Congressman from Florida. He probably KNOWS Bob Allen. They didn't serve in the same area; Scarborough represented the Panhandle while Bob Allen comes from Brevard County on the eastern shore, but state politicians tend to know other state politicians.

Wait until Maddow starts in with the girl in his Pensacola office who died from hitting her head on a desk.

Who Needs a 527?

I saw footage of Barack Obama's trip to Altoona, PA the other day, bowling a gutterball and scoring a paltry 37 (for 7 frames, not a full game, by the way) about 10 times on cable news. I mentally checked off the points that could be made in an attack ad using that footage ("Obama's plan for socialized medicine will throw your money right in the gutter") but quickly realized that they would be superfluous when the media is already so conditioned to view political fights as personal battles among who is more manly, that they're ready to do all the work for the Republicans:

SCARBOROUGH: You know, Willie, the thing is, Americans want their president, if it's a man, to be a real man. They -- 1984, I remember Ronald Reagan goes to South Boston. He holds up that beer mug --

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.

SCARBOROUGH: -- in that South Boston pub, and everybody's like, "He's a real man," and I guess Barack Obama's trying to do the same thing, too.

BRZEZINSKI: Stop it. Oh, come on.

SCARBOROUGH: Awful. Good Lord.

GEIST: He's going to have to try a little harder than he did in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night --

SCARBOROUGH: Oh my God --

BRZEZINSKI: Really?

SCARBOROUGH: Oh, this is awful.

GEIST: -- at the Pleasant Valley Rec Center. He went bowling, and let's just take a quick look at it here. I guess I'll just give you the final numbers. Started out nicely, got the Velcro shoes.

BRZEZINSKI: Looking good, looking good.

GEIST: But then he started bowling. The score you're really after in bowling is 300; that's a perfect score.

BRZEZINSKI: Oh, OK.

SCARBOROUGH: That's perfect score.

BRZEZINSKI: Good, good, good.

SCARBOROUGH: But, you know, if you get 200, you're a good bowler.

GEIST: Sure. You know what?

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah. Two-fifty --

SCARBOROUGH: You get 150, you're a man --

BRZEZINSKI: OK.

SCARBOROUGH: -- or a good woman.

BRZEZINSKI: Stop it.

GEIST: Out of my president, I want a 150, at least. Barack Obama bowled -- well, you can see his form here --

[video clip of Obama bowling]

SCARBOROUGH: Hee!

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.

GEIST: A 37.

BRZEZINSKI: Oh.

GEIST: That's a three, next to a seven.

SCARBOROUGH: Baby, if you go to Altoona, Pennsylvania, on a Saturday night and you're going to try to bowl --

[video clip of Obama bowling]

SCARBOROUGH: Oh, that's so dainty. Ugh.

Chris Matthews (of course) joined in on this yesterday, and added a racial twist:

MATTHEWS: You know, Michelle -- and this gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody, but the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder --

FINEMAN: That doesn't surprise anybody either.

BERNARD: Well, it certainly doesn't surprise anybody black, I can tell you that.

MATTHEWS: Is black a bowling --

FINEMAN: This is just killing him.

MATTHEWS: I don't know, I guess everybody bowls.

FINEMAN: This is just killing him.

MATTHEWS: I know.

FINEMAN: This is just killing him, Chris. Don't show this over and over again.

MATTHEWS: No, no, we're doing it again. This is a killer. Look at this killer. Because it isn't the most macho form there, I must say, but who knows?

The fact that Republicans distinctly try to feminize Democratic Presidential candidates is nothing new. Neither is the fact that the media has internalized this narrative so completely that Republican feminization efforts become redundant. If Clinton somehow takes the nomination, Republicans will have to recalibrate, but I'm sure we'll hear more "she's a castrating rhymes-with-witch" in the media.

This isn't about gender, of course, it's about weakness, it's about a B.S. macho worldview that you have to be tough and rugged to lead, that Democrats can never be tough or rugged, that Republicans are tough and rugged by default. The question is whether or not that works anymore, post-Bush. But it hasn't exactly been disproven in Presidential politics, and the media is so lazy (and of course, heavily invested in this worldview) that they'll continue to frame everything in this way. I'll bet Tweety and Scarborough couldn't stop giggling when they got that bowling footage. After all, it's easier than looking at a health care white paper.

P.S. The question is, how can they square the fey elitist non-bowler Obama with the fact that he's a scary black man responsible for all the nation's crime?

P.P.S. If as a left-hander Obama was bowling with a right-handed bowling ball it wouldn't matter how "macho" he was.

Better For Republicans

It always is. And now they're getting specific. Apparently the death of Pakistan's opposition leader is good news for Rudy Giuliani.

Let's start by remarking how pathetic it is to veer from an international incident into the horse race. Joe Scarborough probably can't locate Pakistan on a map, yet he knows implicitly which Presidential candidate chaos there would reward. And why Giuliani? Because he happened to be coincidentally in the city of record on 9/11, while he proved himself a fool in emergency management by placing the command center in the same building hit by terrorists eight years earlier and providing faulty radios to firefighters?

I think it'd take about a minute and a half to come up with a reasonable (for cable news) argument for any candidate to benefit from the assassination of Bhutto. "It'll help McCain because of his foreign policy experience!" "It'll help Ron Paul because he wants to isolate us from a dangerous world!" "It'll help Mitt Romney because of his managerial steady hand in a time of crisis!" "It'll help Mike Huckabee because he can appeal to a higher power in these dangerous times!" "It'll help Fred Thompson because he'll sleep through it!"

None of these statements have much basis in fact. That's why they are reasonable cable news opinions.

P.S. Just in case you think this kind of instantly insipid analysis is confined to cable news, Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post wrote pretty much the same thing.


UPDATE: It should be noted that Giuliani sent a press release out to this effect before the palace courtiers started reporting on it as if it were fact. So this wasn't only a stupid thought, it was an UNORIGINAL stupid thought.

The Edwards Hits Keep On A-Comin'

When the media isn't ignoring John Edwards altogether, they're slamming him for spurious reasons. This time, Joe "What Dead Intern" Scarborough smears Edwards for wearing proper biking attire. This one is just stupid - George Bush riding with Lance Armstrong is a well-known bit of recent history, and yes, Commander Codpiece wore (shock!) spandex when he did it. And as Attaturk notes, Edwards had biking shorts on over the spandex, so this particular hit by Joey Scar was a lie in addition to being thuddingly stupid.

I mean, I don't want to take up biking myself because I don't like needles - and maybe a Presidential candidate looking for credibility shouldn't associate himself with the Tour de France - but Scarborough's just being an idiot here.

UPDATE: To clarify, I think the press just likes the Hillary-Obama two-horse race and wants it to continue. For example, nobody bothered to notice during the "I'll talk to our enemies" donnybrook that someone else on the stage, Bill Richardson, um, actually talked to most of the enemies on that list, and in so doing extracted a lot of positive elements through tough negotiation.

In an interview late Thursday, Richardson refused to engage in the sparring between Clinton and Obama on the subject. "But on the substance, you know I've actually met a lot of these guys already - I've met Castro, I've met Chavez," Richardson said proudly in a phone call from Fort Dodge, Iowa, where he was campaigning.

Richardson, the former Ambassador to the United Nations who has negotiated with rogue leaders from Saddam Hussein to officials from North Korea, said the latter would be his top priority if he had to schedule a list of meetings with dictators as president. Last on his list, he said, would probably be Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Everyone, he said, deserved the right to talk to the United States if it would resolve a crisis.

"But I'm not just going to say, 'Yeah, I'll meet with you - for what? For coffee?' No, you have to have hard-nosed negotations," he said.

So cut the crap, media. This is not a two-horse race.

Works The Pole

SCARBOROUGH: Have you seen Fred Thompson’s wife?

CRAWFORD: Oh, yeah.

SCARBOROUGH: You think she thinks she works the pole?

CRAWFORD: That’s what a Hollywood career will do for you, I guess.

SCARBOROUGH: What do you mean?

CRAWFORD: You get wives like that.

The reason that you end up with character-assassinating statements like this is because TV journalists are far more interested in being on TV than they are in politics. At the root they don't really care very much about politics, and so they treat it like high school instead of dealing with the real cause and effect it has on people's lives. This is even true of Joe Scarborough, who himself was a Congressman.

The great problem of America is that nobody who pays attention to politics and disseminates it to the population, by and large, is all that interested in politics. They think it's just a game. There are plenty of substantive reasons to criticize Fred Thompson, but saying his wife "works the pole" is beyond where you need to go. This happens on the left as well, with talk of haircuts and Hillary and Bill and Obama's middle name. I'd love to see us get back to policy, but the truth is that, while the media claims that the people aren't that interested in it, the truth is that THEY aren't.