From the monthly archives: July 2014
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I can’t help but think that the lesson we should take from?the Bob Beckel affair is to ignore media-appointed spokespeople of any group large enough to defy such tidy categorization. Such people seem to be chosen primarily for their ability to get media attention, nothing more.
list of casino gamesThis Larison piece is interesting in its own right, but it’s also another reminder that other countries have no problem investigating and, if necessary, prosecuting national leaders. Off the top of my head, Georgia, Germany, Israel, France (their last two!) among others have all done this, and they all continue to stand as countries today, with their own peculiar strengths and weaknesses. Yet D.C. pundits constantly tell us that doing so with a current or former president of the United States, the nation will absolutely fall apart, and thanks to the visionary, generous hackdom statesmanship of Lee Hamilton and Jerry Ford, we avoided that fate both times it was vaguely credible. Only we didn’t, the price has been paid instead by the people having to deal with a succession of presidencies with varying degrees of contempt for the law.
I’ve long thought that establishment?Republicans know that impeachment would be a disaster, as well as ultimately irresistible to the base.?Keeping them from demanding it has always been a question of how effective the establishment is at distracting them. (“Why yes, that’s a question we should…hey look, look over there, it’s a lawsuit against Obama!”) So it’s clever for the White House to be the ones putting the idea out there. Impeachment was a disaster for the Gingrich Republicans, but at least they could blame it on the fact that villagers were just as keen as the wingnuts for that, and arguably more so. Doing it now would divide Republicans and unite Democrats, and I still don’t think Republican politicians will be able to resist that siren’s song (though that would make Rush Limbaugh perhaps the least comely siren imaginable).
Just reading about Hillary Clinton talking about foreign policy is immensely depressing. Not as depressing, say, as a Scott Walker Administration would be. Not at all. But she really does seem to be a true believer in liberal hawk bullshit, and all we can do is hope that she’s pragmatic enough not to indulge it too much if she becomes president.
We really need to expand the slate of crimes eligible for the death penalty.
Yep, a whopping 10% of respondents thought The Phantom Menace was the best Star Wars movie. ?The mind reels.
In a post on the viability of movement conservatism to win nationwide elections, Martin Longman makes a dubious point:
Both John McCain and Mitt Romney might have won the presidency if they had been allowed to run as moderates, but they both had to sacrifice that label to win the nomination.
I don’t really agree with this.?There was no real chance that McCain could have won in 2008, but he was the relative moderate in the field and accentuated his non-movement positions ferociously. It didn’t matter: Republicans had to defend a disastrously unpopular and failed president who most of them nevertheless staunchly supported right up until the end, and there was no political jiu-jitsu that was going to square that peg. The only way Republicans might have had a chance was by repudiating the entirety of Bush’s presidency, which would not have been possible given the GOP never gave Bush less than a 70% approval rating. Romney might have been a different story, but?I’d argue that ideology wasn’t his real problem. Romney was simply overrated as a politician: his record of governance was essentially ignored from the outset in large part because it couldn’t be pressed into any useful form for his campaign (too much bipartisan cooperation for the primary, too many overridden vetoes and dysfunction for the general), his business record–the cornerstone of his campaign–wound up being easy grist for the oppo mill,?too easy to tie him to the global financial mumbo-jumbo that few people understand but that most inherently distrust.?Really, outside of his brazen and energetic propensity for lying there wasn’t much that wasn’t generic there, though probably not much needed to be: as all challengers to a president do, he ran on a “things are shitty” platform and people decided they weren’t shitty enough to vote for him. Not much else he could have done, and adopting a couple of more moderate positions probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
D-Fein was in rare form this weekend, earning her least-valuable Democrat award again,?doing her usual thing of mindlessly ratcheting up a tense foreign policy situation with bellicose rhetoric–at one point arguably a necessary evil in a state with a huge concentration of military voters and defense work, but at this point an out-of-touch and indelible habit, though what’s remarkable is how stupidly?and ineffectively she does it. Not really much to say other than that she does not look well at all.
This?is hilarious.
Work has started on what when finished will be the world’s largest carbon capture facility… [T]he project will capture a portion of the emissions from the coal-fired W.A. Parish Generating Station. The CO2?will then be compressed and piped to the West Ranch oil field, where it will be injected under ground. Read more on Irony of the Day: Carbon Begets Carbon…
Jerry Shepherd: Keep Howard Schultz off the ballot, any ballot.? Can he pass a test on the Constitution??? Does he know anything about...
Metavirus: At least when it came to someone like Ross Perot you got some fun Texas-twanged leprechaun moments out of him.? “Larry,...
lumpkin: Amazing that Schultz doesn’t see what a Quixotic farce his “candidacy” is. The board of directors at...
Lev: Pretty much. Also, these people clearly don’t understand how government works. It’s not like they could just present Trump with a...
