Andrew Breitbart was a merry prankster who challenged political correctness and the worst aspects of Leftist censorship, control, and bully culture with bold assaults and humor and did so in ways no one else was even trying – specifically – without being a doctrinaire right wing hack like Bill Buckley, an obsequious establishment partisan like Sean Hannity, or a moralizing religious zealot like much of talk radio. Instead he was fresh and funny and most importantly: not very political. He was political in the sense of challenging power and clowning on powerful members of the State infringing on rights. He wasn’t against same sex marriage and wasn’t a vicious school marm of a scold on issues regarding sex or cultural influence and involvement of marginalized groups of americans – which up until him was basically the cost of admission for any right-of-center political figure who combatted the dogma of big government shackles on individual liberties of speech, self-protection, and finance.
Former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay social commentator, agitator, admitted provocateur, and impressario, is the only figure who comes close to Andrew Breitbarts legacy of lampooning, trolling, and seriously discussing deep issues that force thought from different perspective amidst the other storms of chaos and mischief towards orthodox traditions of both political norms that they create and instigate.
And yet Breitbart.com abandoned him a year ago when he was attacked for joking and otherwise making light of his own experience as a victim of sexual predation by an older man. While Breitbart didn’t fire him or completely throw him under the bus and Milo left to save them the hassle of increasingly uncomfortable defenses of him that almost certainly would have culminated in a request that he leave, the publication still didn’t do anything to protect one of their own from the character assassination he experienced, and that was a severe error for their position politically, let alone the moral implications of not protecting “one of the family”.
Milo wrote on Instagram (one of the last media platforms that allows him after Twitter and Patreon banned him) under a screenshot of a Breitbart story headlining how Mitt Romney is a RINO or something boring and mainstream-conservative-safezone as it gets, a pretty excellent summation of my feelings towards the Breitbart that was vs the Breitbart that is vs the Breitbart that could have been. Milo’s commentary:
New year, new start! On reflection, and with a heavy heart, I’ve deleted Breitbart from my bookmarks. I loved my time there and I’d return in a heartbeat, but, without me, the team there has simply forgotten how to be interesting, and without Steve, they’ve lost their fighting spirit. There’s just nothing that grabs my attention on the site any more.
When I was at Breitbart, we defined the culture. We were the epicenter of exciting, rebellious countercultural thought. We crushed campus feminism, defended the heroes of Gamergate, threw bombs into campus safe spaces, named and shamed abusive Leftist bullies, published dissident gay editorials, christened new movements… and it was FUNNY and a joy to read.
But what are the writers I hired and trained doing now? Where’s the energy gone? Now the site is spineless and boring, chasing after other, more interesting people six months after everyone else has already covered them—and betraying, denying, disavowing and unpersoning its former stars.
Alternate title: The correct yet totally hypocritical party stance of replacing Scalia.
Photo Credit: Creative Commons/Shawn Calhoun
Justice Antonin Scalia died in his sleep on a hunting trip, leaving a vacancy on the Supreme Court which now raises a bunch of questions regarding which party gets to nominate someone to fill that vacancy.
The rules on replacing a retiring or life-retired (read: dead) Justice are: The President nominates a person for the vacancy and the Senate Judiciary Committee (Senators who are part of a kind of “judge pickers club”) publicly interviews them with questions and then the Senate votes on whether or not to confirm the nominee as a Judge on the Supreme Court. Right now the White House is filled by a Leftist Democrat and the Senate (and its judiciary committee) is controlled by center-Right Republicans. So who gets to fill this seat?
In an interesting plot twist: both Republicans and Democrats are factually correct (in different areas) and yet total hypocrites on the issue.
Specifically, Democrats claim President Obama should obviously be appointing the new judge for a speedy confirmation by the Senate and Republicans say since President Obama has less than 1 year left as President, the new one that takes office in January 2017 should be the one to make the nomination (which they hope will be a Republican).
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) may be a total partisan hack who peddles easily debunked talking points from her hippie base on the regular, but she’s right in her comments on this subject…
“Senator McConnell is right that the American people should have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court justice. In fact, they did — when President Obama won the 2012 election by five million votes,” Ms. Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor, said in a statement.
“Article II Section 2 of the Constitution says the President of the United States nominates justices to the Supreme Court, with the advice and consent of the Senate,” she wrote. “I can’t find a clause that says ‘…except when there’s a year left in the term of a Democratic President.’”
She added: “Senate Republicans took an oath just like Senate Democrats did. Abandoning the duties they swore to uphold would threaten both the Constitution and our democracy itself. It would also prove that all the Republican talk about loving the Constitution is just that — empty talk.”
That’s all true in the most “duh” of fashions. Unfortunately for Warren though, the same Constitution they all took an oath to uphold, applies to the other party as well, and the unmistakable fact of the matter at hand is that of course Congress can deny Obama this appointment.
Consent means the Senate is under no obligation whatsoever even to hold a vote on any presidential appointment. The Senate’s obligation is to do what the Senate wants, and only what the Senate wants. Those are the rules. To try to hold senators to a different rule is to try to change the rules on them–and people tend to resent that. Everyone is free to disagree with the positions individual senators or the Senate as a whole take on individual nominations or prospective nominations. But there is no question that senators individually or collectively can deny their consent to any actual or prospective nomination for any reason–just as the American people can vote for whomever they want, for whatever reason they want.
Indeed, President Obama isn’t even entitled to nominate a replacement for Justice Scalia–or at least, Congress can deny him that right. The Constitution gives Congress the power to decide how many seats there are on the Supreme Court. In 1789, there were only six. Given sufficient congressional support (i.e., veto-proof majorities in both chambers), Congress could reduce the number of Supreme Court justices from the current nine to eight. McConnell, Cruz, and Rubio could propose doing so right now. It seems strange to criticize senators who are merely expressing in what circumstances they will withhold their consent when Congress has the power to deny the president the ability to fill this vacancy entirely by itself eliminating this vacancy.
At the same time Democrats turn a blind eye to President Obama repeatedly ignoring constitutional limits on his power, they claim Republicans would dishonor the Constitution if they use powers the Constitution clearly grants them. That is unlikely to dissuade Senate Republicans from delaying a vote on Scalia’s successor until 2017. Nor should it.
So now that it is established that it is both an easily verifiable “duh” that yes, the President can go forward with this process as usual but yes, the Senate can halt this process as usual – the real question is what *should* happen logically, morally, and reasonably.
Here’s where the derpiness starts…
Seems to me that the timing of an election should play no role in judicial appointments and claiming otherwise is just playing politics in the kind of loophole bullcrap ways everyone hates about politics.
[T]he Senate does have an obligation to fulfill its “advice and consent” obligation. Says the Constitution, the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court…” A preemptive rejection of any possible Supreme Court appointment is self-evidently in conflict with that obligation. The phrase “do not let it become about whoever Obama names” makes that explicit.
A man as versed in the Constitution as Senator Cruz should be embarrassed to posit that the nation could owe a debt to Scalia, that a “debt” to a dead man should play any role in a process governed by the Constitution, or that a sitting president’s nominee should be preemptively rejected before his or her identity is known. There is no agreed upon standard of what legitimate advice and consent entails. But any standard that rejects a nomination before it is even made fails the laugh test.
James Madison’s Constitution is not a living, breathing document that changes in meaning as an election approaches. A president is no less legitimate as a lame duck. The Framers intended for the Senate to give up-or-down votes based on a nominee’s merit, however it’s defined. The timing of an election should play no role.
In Bidens case, it’s especially egregious because his argument was made in the absence of a vacancy. He was just pre-emptively making the case that “in case this happens, the president should be advised that this is the normal way of doing things and it would be wrong to do it any different way”… Oops…
Former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner currently holds no public office, is not a written or television pundit anywhere and is generally out of political life outside of merely commenting on it as a civilian. So why are some Republican outlets still hecktoring him years after he was a threat to them? Have you people no decency?
Fine. Potential poor choice of words since decency is what gave Weiner his scarlet letter in the first place but that doesn’t excuse the surrounding details of his situation: mainly the fact that he isn’t in a position in power or influence anymore, so making him the object of ridicule is punching-down in a distasteful way in my opinion.
For those of you who forgot or never knew: Congressman Weiner accidentally publicly tweeted a picture of an erection visible through his underwear when he meant to send it privately to a girl he was e-flirty with via sexy pics and messages. He denied it at first and then came clean about it when that strategy failed and blah blah blah. Okay – fine. We get it. It’s funny cuz of his name, cuz it’s definitely a skeezy thing to do while married and usually a skeezy thing to do even if not and all that jazz – okay. He resigned. A couple years afterward he ran for mayor of NYC and didn’t win the primary.
Yet for the past several years that he has been out of office I will randomly see hit pieces on the former congressman in Conservative media and they are always 100% gratuitous and bizarre.
Today it’s gotten so bad that they’re even hassling him over tweeting about traffic in NYC.
Sounds like fair and rationale criticism to me. Also sounds like a guy tweeting about traffic… So under what circumstances are you the cool guy in an exchange where someone says “well THIS sure seems to be a dumb use of public resources that is inconveniencing the citizens of the city” and you respond with “oh yea? REMEMBER WHEN YOU SEND DICKPICS TO GIRLS ON THE INTERNET? BURN!”
Wtf, people…
Worse is the adoption of this one photo of Weiner scowling that has become the go-to clipart in hit pieces on him, similar to the Bill O’Reilly cry-face.
I admit that I always liked Congressman Weiner so maybe i’m being blind to what is fair dialog and treatment of a public figure in such circumstances but I think it’s gratuitous to randomly keep recycling a sexting scandal when the dude talks about anything as non-related as unnecessary street closures.
Pick your battles, Republicans. Save your fire for the bullies, not the Weiners.
In 2012, Republicans had an opportunity to gain a Nixon landslide without the possibility of Nixon corruption or scandal by running a near-perfect man for the job of president and shunned it for petty stupid reasons. That man eventually became their nominee anyway but even his expert handling of the hand he was dealt was no match for an incumbent president who had 4 more years to organize as well as enjoy the comfort of positive press as his opposition party did his job of weakening theirs. The Obama Administrations mobilized base achieved a decisive victory to reelection.
Republicans could rectify this error and re-nominate their still-best-candidate again who has already been vetted and tried and come up clean and instead, powerful voices in the party are destroying their best chance at 2016 yet again.
Instead, the party of idiots will go through a year and a half of bloodying their bodies and creating more ill-will amongst the various factions that comprise it in another completely stupid Primary that will hurt far more than it helps. The reason it won’t help is that the differences between the ideology of the contenders that have an actual shot at the nomination is miniscule. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Jeb Bush administrations would differ little in policy. The question here is electability and marketing. But Republicans are too stupid and petty to see that.
The reason running the guy who lost the last go-around remains their best strategy is simply due to the fact that Mitt Romney remains their best figure in the 3 key categories that matter:
Electability: Might sound odd to say about the guy who lost last time around, but the fact remains that his balance of ideology, background, and approach to issues is the most electable option for the 2nd straight national election cycle.
Purity: The dude is so scandal-free that it is almost inhuman. Which ironically serves as a downside because then he is resented for how impossibly perfect he is and demonized by the other side for exactly that reason.
Representation: If Republicans could make a perfect candidate they would all vote to Frankenstein together a sterling family man with successful business experience who has served in a legislative position but didn’t engrain himself in Washington bureaucracy or corruption.The Republican Party stands for individual liberty outweighing government power, the reduction of government power over individuals lives from laws to regulations to taxes, core founding document principal preservation, American cultural conservation, and a strong national defense. Maybe the party will get a better figure to represent these values in the future, but as of now, there is no more perfect individual for the GOP than the family man who spent a life in the private sector both enriching himself and others as well as charitably improving the lives of his neighbors yet became interested in the direction of the country’s leadership enough to serve in an executive position and remain involved in the national dialog.
Ideological Sensibility: He follows the 3 legs of the Reagan-Conservatism stool while remaining sensible and adaptable. He doesn’t have any extreme positions or baggage to make him legitimately unpalatable, so when the inevitable attacks claiming as such happen, they are much easily dispatched than with less moderate candidates.
2012 should have been a Republican victory election year.
The Democratic incumbent, while personally popular, supported a list of widely unpopular positions including his signature name-bearing achievement that passed through bipartisan opposition with 1 deciding senatorial vote and was noted to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court but ruled as constitutional under the grounds that the Administration was lying about it the whole time (the Supreme Court ruled that the cornerstone rule in “Obamacare” that forced citizens to buy a product from a corporation was clearly illegal, but that calling the mandate’s punishment for disobeying it a “tax” was clearly within allowable bounds. Thus, the Obama administration, who had argued that the mandate is not a tax, won the case under the ruling that they were lying and it in fact is a tax).
Twas Systemic Idiocy that Lost the Race
Individual Republicans are just as astute and capable as anyone else, but the Republican party and conservative base as a collective is a band of absolute clueless self destructive idiots.
In no better way has this been on display more radically than the primary for both the 2008 and 2012 elections in where the party did everything possible to bludgeon themselves into a position of weakness and frailty before facing a far more prepared and expert opponent.
This is because Republicans generally are arrogant and clueless to social realities outside their analytical bubbles.
When facing an opponent with the power, organization, media attention, name recognition, financing, bully pulpit, and experience of having already won a presidential campaign – there ain’t no time for dickin around. In an election with no incumbent President or Vice President, such as 2008, the primary to choose a nominee for president can afford a more diverse group of contenders that include longshot candidates, since both political parties are going through the process. However, in an election to unseat an incumbent president or sitting vice president of the opposing party, there is no room for error, time wasting or to indulge longshot candidates or abstract party platforms.
Because of its sheer arrogance and stupidity, an active minority within the Republican party did all of the above and more and lost the election for themselves like the bag of tools they are.
Here are 5 reasons how this group of powerful morons worked hard to accomplish this feat of foolishness and snatch failure from the jaws of victory…
SQUANDERING PRECIOUS PRIMARY TIME ON CANDIDATES WITH NO CHANCE OF WINNING
The rules of history, present electoral climate, and logical analysis reveal that the most likely path to the presidency is from a Governor and secondly, a popular Senator. The path to the presidency from the House of Representatives or from the Private Sector with no political experience is at such longshot odds to make it virtually non-existent.
Thus, logic dictates that the only candidates with a serious chance to win in 2012 and thus the only candidates worthy of serious consideration from voters were:
The entire primary should have been between these 4 men, alone.
Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer would have been welcomed as well until their inevitable exit to seek the nomination of other loser parties after failing to gain any traction. Johnson went on to gain a typical less-than-1% of the vote as the Losertarian Party nominee and Roemer was the nominee of the Reform Party, which got something like 2 dozen votes or so.
Yet the news articles, media interview clips and headlines and most importantly – the debate stages – were also polluted with the likes of the following no-chancers:
-Ron Paul (U.S. Representative from Texas who never won a single primary state in any of his 3 presidential runs) -Michelle Bachmann (U.S. Representative, Minnesota) -Newt Gingrich (former polarizing U.S. House Speaker who hadn’t held political office since resigning from the House amidst controversy in the 1990s) -Rick Santorum (former Pennsylvania Senator who lost his 2006 reelection by 18 points and had remained out of political office since) -Herman Cain (Businessman founder of a regional pizza chain with no political experience)
These 5 candidates should not have run for president in that cycle as they were all vanity candidacies with little shot at the nomination and sure-fire losers in the general election. Although it is the right of any naturally born American citizen over the age of 30 to run for the office of President, it is the collective duty of the citizens that make up the grassroots activists, party leadership and voters themselves to not reward vanity candidacies and instead limit their support to the candidates whom most articulate their beliefs from within the realm of possibility to win, especially in an election against a powerful incumbent.
Instead, for an entire year, these individuals ate up the headlines with reality show style snipes at each other and mostly toward their eventual nominee they would all switch to tacitly supporting.
An entire. friggin. year…
A STUPIDLY LONG PRIMARY WITH AN ABSURD AMOUNT OF USELESS DEBATES
The time for a long primary season to give lesser funded candidates a chance to be heard and considered was 2008 while the Democrats did the same. The 2012 election however, was against a sitting president, which means every single day that the Republicans spent arguing amongst themselves was another day the Democrat had to argue to the American people, for himself and his brand, and against the Republican party. So that means there was a competition to be held in where a lead-up to that competition had one unified force attacking the other side and that other side attacking itself for that same period.
In order to win the 2012 election, the mathematically most-electable candidates needed to have been isolated early in the primary, condensed to a micro period of campaigning to make their case to the public and then boiled down to the one amongst them with the most amount of financing, support, organization, and adherence to party principals in where he should have been fast-tracked to the nomination with a maximum of 7 debates within a maximum period of 9 months (the length of time to gestate a baby should not be exceeded by the length of time to choose a politician you like best from a group of other politicians).
Instead, idiots that they are, the republican party and conservative base sought to achieve the exact opposite: to prevent a “coronation” of their inevitable nominee.
Thanks to RNC Chairman Michael Steele, the Republican primary lasted a grueling year of wasteful and expensive destructive in-fighting with a total of 20 divisive, destructive and ultimately Republican brand-damaging debates.
The first Republican primary debate occurred in May 2011 and the last didn’t happen until February 2012. The nominee wasn’t chosen until another 3 months afterward when on May 29th 2012, Mitt Romney finally crossed the threshold of 1,144 delegates – the number needed to win the GOP nomination. That means that the Republican party had no nominee to face Barack Obama until 5 months and 6 days before election day. But what is worse is that Romney’s campaigning to the public was constricted beyond even that minuscule amount of time because the official nomination for a presidential nominee (freeing up funds that nominee is allowed to spend on their campaign) doesn’t happen until the parties convention and that didn’t happen until August 28, 2012.
That means that Republicans spent 1 entire year wasting time and millions of dollars and resources attacking their own nominee for president, while that nominee had only 2 months and 6 days to spend their resources and targeted messaging attacking the incumbent Democratic president.
The usage of this time is clear: Republicans irresponsibly and stupidly misused the year+ of time in choosing their nominee while that nominee, Mitt Romney, used his 2 months and 6 days spectacularly well. Finally allowed to speak directly to the American people and his opponent, he unequivocally destroyed President Obama in the first debate to epic degrees. He performed similarly on-point in the second debate which was derailed not by Romney’s misstep but by the unprecedented overstep of the debate moderator Candy Crowley’s fraudulent bail-out of Obama amidst Romney calling him out on a major point of dishonesty. He continued strong on the campaign trail and in interviews, remaining cool and in command through and beyond the 3rd and final Presidential debate – which was considered a draw only because most of the points Romney was so presciently correct on didn’t reveal themselves until months later when it was too late.
The Republicans were already facing an uphill battle to unseat Barack Obama and giving Mitt Romney 2 months in which to do it was hard enough, but they needed to send him into that battle strengthened and with power behind him and instead pushed him out there politically broken and bruised to where the mostly uninterested voting majority defaulted to the popular meme about the media on this candidate peddled by the Democrats, their supportive media surrogates, and the Republican primary contestants for the previous year whom had all said Romney was an uncaring out of touch plutocrat who doesn’t care about the poor. Thus, by the time Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Candy hit, the anchor tied around the GOP nominee by his own party was barely too much to overcome.
But why?… Why would Republicans be so irresponsibly stupid as to try so hard to destroy their leading standard bearer?
The following reason is why…
OBSESSIVE “NOT CONSERVATIVE ENOUGH” WITCH HUNTING
Instead of following the William F Buckley rule of choosing “the most conservative candidate who can win”, idiot Republicans sought to choose “the most conservative candidate”, arrogantly expecting the whole winning thing to just fall into place somehow afterward. This is mathematically stupid because the majority of voters do not identify as “conservatives” they identify as “moderates”.
But what is worse is that Romney not only was the most electable candidate in 2012, but he was also the most conservative option.
In 2008 Romney was the “conservative alternative” to the establishment choice of the more moderate John McCain. McCain’s team smeared Romney as a “flip-flopper” and that was the big charge against him (because he dared to join conservatives on the issue of abortion, going from supporting abortion rights in the 90s to becoming pro-life as Massachusetts Governor) but his social, foreign, or economic conservatism was not in question in 2008. National Review lauded him as such, Laura Ingraham introduced him as “the conservatives conservative”, conservative businessman Herman Cain endorsed him, Rick Santorum introduced him at a rally as the only choice for a conservative candidate and Romneys conservative approach to Governing the 2nd most liberal state in the union (after Vermont) was praised as an example of how he was able to change minds and bring people towards the right.
Yet in 2012, these same sources dubiously decided that Romney was not conservative enough despite none of his positions from 2008 having changed at all. Suddenly Romney was being mocked instead of lauded for saying his tax cutting, government shrinking stewardship of Massachusetts was “severely conservative”, conservative magazines and talk radio were skeptical of him, and people like Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich who all endorsed “Romney the conservative” in 2008 were impossibly running against him because he wasn’t a real conservative.
The smears stuck with the ignorant Republican base who bought the smears, seemingly coming from a consensus in Right-wing media, dragging out the primary a half year longer than it needed to be. The self destructive part of this insanity was that the Republican “conservative alternatives” to Romney were anything but. In the 2012 election, the candidates deemed more conservative than Mitt Romney were:
-Rick Perry: A career politician governing the countries 2nd most Conservative state (after Oklahoma) with tax hikes, and a liberal record on illegal immigration.
-Rick Santorum: A former pro-abortion rights politician turned pro-life Statist who consistently supported and voted for big government and the welfare state in the senate including debt ceiling increases, Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, long lists of wasteful spending including funding the infamous “bridge to no where”, and supporting Arlen Spector (who later became a Democrat and became the deciding vote for Obamacare) over Pat Toomey (the conservative PA Senator who now resides in Arlen Spectors former seat after running again and winning the election after Santorum’s loss).
These 3 choices were what was falsely portrayed to the conservative base as being more solidly right-wing than one Mitt Romney: A Washington outsider family man without a shred of impropriety in his entire personal and public life who was a successful businessman that ran the nations 2nd most Leftist state conservatively, never supporting a tax increase, and is largely responsible for getting Scott Brown elected as Republican Massachusetts senator nearly exclusively so he could be the deciding vote against Obamacare.
And for all the conservative misinformation about Romney, it amounted to nothing but damage among moderates – not conservatives, thus losing the election. Romney was able to show conservatives he was and would be one of them, but the negative attacks against him proved to be too much for him to overcome among moderates – a destruction achieved with the help of his own party.
Despite a myth being propagated the day after election day (before total counts were tallied) claiming that 3 million conservatives stayed home – Romney won those votes in historic proportions.
In fact, Mitt Romney won more Conservative votes than Conservative demigod Ronald Reagan.
Reagan won a landslide in 1980 with an electorate that, according to exit polls, was 28% conservative. Romney lost in 2012 with an electorate that was 35% conservative. Reagan won 78% of conservatives. Romney won 80% of conservatives.
Yet Reagan landslided to victory and Romney lost decisively. The difference between them is that Reagan won moderates. Romney lost moderates by 16 points.
The reason Romney lost moderates? Because his brand was damaged by his own party.
Romney lost moderates and the election because of the conservative in-fighting by desperate less-conservative challengers that included liberal smears against him that his Republican opponents tarnished him with for a full year before the Democrats did…
ATTACKING THEIR EVENTUAL NOMINEE… FROM THE LEFT
When a candidate in a primary is on track to win and you don’t want them to, it is natural to pull out all the stops in order to defeat them; however, when squabbling within one political party, it is an insane and deranged tactic to confirm all the talking points of the opposing political party during your in-fighting.
The attacks against Mitt Romney by his fellow Republicans were straight out of the Democrats playbook…
Governor Tim Pawlenty led the way in using the Left’s talking point on the Massachusetts healthcare plan Romney presided over being identical to Obamacare, making the term “Obamneycare” go viral before gutlessly backing off that accusation and then joining the Romney campaign without ever explaining any evolution in thinking on the charge.
Governor Rick Perry used the Lefts talking points on Immigration to smear his own party with exactly the emotional appeal fallacies the left leverages on the issue. Championing push for in-state tuition for illegals in Texas, Perry said “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.” To which Romney shut down by noting “I think if you’re opposed to illegal immigration, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a heart. It means that you have a heart and a brain.” A perfect shut down of this Leftist talking point – yet Conservative media analyzers lauded Perry from the Left over Romneys retort from the right.
Former Senator Rick Santorum attacked Romney from the Left on his wealth which Santorum claimed put him out of touch with blue collar families. Santorum attacked Romney for his financial success and his history in the business world, claiming that “America doesn’t need a CEO” (despite conservatives thinking that is exactly what the country needed). Santorum, who is nationally unpopular and has been out of elected office since losing his last election by 18 points, also brazenly attacked Romney as “unelectable” in debates, on Twitter, and through tv commercials attacking the Governor for being awesome in the private sector.
Once again, Romney had the perfect logical and conservative response, noting “If we become one of those societies that attacks success, one outcome is certain – there will be a lot less success.” But instead of lauding this advocacy of the foundation of their economic ideology, right-wing media praised the Leftist attack and buried or criticized Romney’s on-point rebuttal.
Newt Gingrich, the most liberal candidate in the primary, combined Perry and Santorums approaches and attacked Romney from the Left on both economics and immigration. Gingrich smeared Romney from the Left on his work as a businessman and specifically his time at Bain Capital, endorsing a Pro-Gingrich PAC produced documentary titled King of Bain which is a Michael Moore style production filled with emotional appeal fallacies and half truths. Gingrich claimed that Romney “looted” companies while at Bain, with no real deconstruction or argument whatsoever of the practices Bain Capital used while restructuring and turning profits from failing businesses.
Further attacking Romney for saying that he would not go rounding up families to deport them but would rather support legal policies that would cause some illegals to “self deport, Gingrich jumped on the Left-wing smear that this made Romney “anti-immigration”.
Yet again, Romney shut down his leftist attackers with conservative logic and accuracy in one of my favorite debate smackdowns in history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFSf0H1gEE
It was obvious to any objective observer that Mitt Romney would and should be the 2012 nominee shortly after the primary season began. Not everyone had to like that, but the destructive tactics used against him weren’t necessary either ended up being total failures by failing in every area possible: They did not stop Romney from being the nominee, but did stop him from winning the election.
Way to go, idiots. It worked like a charm.
In other words: Mitt Romney won on the issues. The reason he lost the election were because Republicans Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum smeared him with Democratic talking points that stuck.
One shouldn’t expect this angle from their own side, but at least these attacks came from competitors of Romney’s for the nomination and thus conservative and center-right media figures could referee and point out their desperate and counterproductive tactics. Except, as alluded to earlier and covered in the next section: they emphatically didn’t.
A STUPIDLY DIVISIVE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA
Regardless of political persuasion, you can’t expect the average citizen to be doing independent research on political matters completely on their own. They turn to their like minded commentators for guidance and in the 2012 election primary, they were wildly misguided.
The top culprits smearing Romney in the 3 major markets of radio, print, and blogging were:
Mark Levin: talk radio show host who smeared Romney on the radio to his grassroots listeners. Phillip Klein: columnist at the Washington Examiner who used foolish and cliche talking points in repeated attacks on Romney. Erik Erikson: founder of RedState.com who perpetuated Romney smears online.
But really, no one else in conservative media helped all that much outside of the astute broadcasters on Salem Radio Network including Dennis Prager (who was fair, despite not initially supporting Romney), Michael Medved (who endorsed Romney early in the primary season) and Hugh Hewitt (a long time Romney supporter who none-the-less was fair to the entire field and refrained from smears and talking points).
With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?
Conclusion…
Mitt Romney was the best candidate Republicans had in decades and the party did everything possible to prevent him from winning the election. These conservative grass rooters succeeding in failing.
The Republican base lost the 2012 election. Not Mitt Romney.
Individual Republicans are just as astute and capable as anyone else, but the Republican party and conservative base as a collective is a band of absolute clueless self destructive idiots.
In no better way has this been on display more radically than the primary for both the 2008 and 2012 elections in where the party did everything possible to bludgeon themselves into a position of weakness and frailty before facing a far more prepared and expert opponent.
This is because Republicans generally are arrogant and clueless to social realities outside their analytical bubbles.
When facing an opponent with the power, organization, media attention, name recognition, financing, bully pulpit, and experience of having already won a presidential campaign – there ain’t no time for dickin around.
In an election with no incumbent President or Vice President, such as 2008, the primary to choose a nominee for president can afford a more diverse group of contenders that include longshot candidates, since both political parties are going through the process. However, in an election to unseat an incumbent president or sitting vice president of the opposing party, there is no room for error, time wasting or to indulge longshot candidates or abstract party platforms. Because of its sheer arrogance and stupidity, an active minority within the Republican party did all of the above and more and lost the election for themselves like the bag of tools they are.
Here are 5 reasons how they worked hard to accomplish this feat of foolishness…
SQUANDERING PRECIOUS TIME ON CANDIDATES WITH NO CHANCE OF WINNING The rules of history, present electoral climate, and logical analysis reveal that the most likely path to the presidency is from a Governor and secondly, a popular Senator. The path to the presidency from the House of Representatives or from the Private Sector with no political experience is at such longshot odds to make it virtually non-existent.
Thus, logic dictates that the only candidates with a serious chance to win in 2012 and thus the only candidates worthy of serious consideration from voters were:
The entire primary should have been between these 4 men, alone. Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer would have been welcomed as well until their inevitable exit to seek the nomination of other loser parties after failing to gain any traction (Johnson went on to gain a typical less-than-1% of the vote as the Losertarian Party nominee and Roemer was the nominee of the Reform Party, which got something like 2 dozen votes or so).
Yet the news articles, media interview clips and headlines and most importantly – the debate stages – were also polluted with the likes of the following no-chancers:
-Ron Paul (U.S. Representative from Texas who never won a single primary state in any of his 3 presidential runs)
-Michelle Bachmann (U.S. Representative, Minnesota)
-Newt Gingrich (former polarizing U.S. House Speaker who hadn’t held political office since resigning from the House amidst controversy in the 1990s)
-Rick Santorum (former Pennsylvania Senator who lost his 2006 reelection by 18 points and had remained out of politics since)
-Herman Cain (founder of a pizza chain with no political experience)
These 5 candidates should not have run for president in that cycle as they were all vanity candidacies with little shot at the nomination and sure-fire losers in the general election. Although it is the right of any naturally born American citizen over the age of 30 to run for the office of President, it is the collective duty of the citizens that make up the grassroots activists, party leadership and voters themselves to not reward vanity candidacies and instead limit their support to the candidates whom most articulate their beliefs from within the realm of possibility to win, especially in an election against a powerful incumbent.
A STUPIDLY LONG PRIMARY WITH AN ABSURD AMOUNT OF DEBATES
The time for a long primary season to give lesser funded candidates a chance to be heard and considered was 2008 while the Democrats did the same. The 2012 election however, was against a sitting president, which means every single day that the Republicans spent arguing amongst themselves was another day the Democrat had to argue to the American people, for himself and his brand, and against the Republican party.
In order to win the 2012 election, the mathematically most-electable candidates needed to have been isolated early in the primary, condensed to a micro period of campaigning to make their case to the public and then boiled down to the one amongst them with the most amount of financing, support, organization, and adherence to party principals in where he should have been fast-tracked to the nomination with a maximum of 7 debates within a maximum period of 9 months (the length of time to gestate a baby should not be exceeded by the length of time to choose a politician you like best from a group of other politicians).
Instead, idiots that they are, the republican party and conservative base sought to achieve the exact opposite: to prevent a “coronation” of their inevitable nominee.
Thanks to RNC Chairman Michael Steele, the Republican primary lasted a grueling year of wasteful and expensive destructive in-fighting with a total of 20 divisive, destructive and ultimately Republican brand-damaging debates.
The first Republican primary debate occurred in May 2011 and the last didn’t happen until February 2012. The nominee wasn’t chosen until another 3 months afterward when on May 29th 2012, Mitt Romney finally crossed the threshold of 1,144 delegates – the number needed to win the GOP nomination. That means that the Republican party had no nominee to face Barack Obama until 5 months and 6 days before election day. But what is worse is that Romney’s campaigning to the public was constricted beyond even that minuscule amount of time because the official nomination for a presidential nominee (freeing up funds that nominee is allowed to spend on their campaign) doesn’t happen until the parties convention and that didn’t happen until August 28, 2012.
That means that Republicans spent 1 entire year wasting time and millions of dollars and resources attacking their own nominee for president, while that nominee had only 2 months and 6 days to spend their resources and targeted messaging attacking the incumbent Democratic president.
The usage of this time is clear: Republicans irresponsibly and stupidly misused the year+ of time in choosing their nominee while that nominee, Mitt Romney, used his 2 months and 6 days spectacularly well. Finally allowed to speak directly to the American people and his opponent, he unequivocally destroyed President Obama in the first debate to epic degrees. He performed similarly on-point in the second debate which was derailed not by Romney’s misstep but by the unprecedented overstep of the debate moderator Candy Crowley’s fraudulent bail-out of Obama amidst Romney calling him out on a major point of dishonesty. He continued strong on the campaign trail and in interviews, remaining cool and in command through and beyond the 3rd and final Presidential debate – which was considered a draw only because most of the points Romney was so presciently correct on didn’t reveal themselves until months later when it was too late.
The Republicans were already facing an uphill battle to unseat Barack Obama and giving Mitt Romney 2 months in which to do it was hard enough, but they needed to send him into that battle strengthened and with power behind him and instead pushed him out there politically broken and bruised to where the mostly uninterested voting majority defaulted to the popular meme about the media on this candidate peddled by the Democrats, their supportive media surrogates, and the Republican primary contestants for the previous year whom had all said Romney was an uncaring out of touch plutocrat who doesn’t care about the poor. Thus, by the time Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Candy hit, the anchor tied around the GOP nominee by his own party was barely too much to overcome.
But why?… Why would Republicans be so irresponsibly stupid as to try so hard to destroy their leading standard bearer? The following reason is why…
OBSESSIVE “NOT CONSERVATIVE ENOUGH” WITCH HUNTING
Instead of following the William F Buckley rule of choosing “the most conservative candidate who can win”, idiot Republicans sought to choose “the most conservative candidate”, arrogantly expecting the whole winning thing to just fall into place somehow afterward. This is mathematically stupid because the majority of voters do not identify as “conservatives” they identify as “moderates”.
But what is worse is that Romney not only was the most electable candidate in 2012, but he was also the most conservative option.
In 2008 Romney was the “conservative alternative” to the establishment choice of the more moderate John McCain. McCain’s team smeared Romney as a “flip-flopper” and that was the big charge against him (because he dared to join conservatives on the issue of abortion, going from supporting abortion rights in the 90s to becoming pro-life as Massachusetts Governor) but his social, foreign, or economic conservatism was not in question in 2008. National Review lauded him as such, Laura Ingraham introduced him as “the conservatives conservative”, businessman Herman Cain endorsed him, Rick Santorum introduced him at a rally as the only choice for a conservative candidate and Romneys conservative approach to Governing the 2nd most liberal state in the union (after Vermont) was praised as an example of how he was able to change minds and bring people towards the right.
Yet in 2012, these same sources magically decided that Romney was not conservative enough despite none of his positions from 2008 having changed at all. Suddenly Romney was being mocked instead of lauded for saying his tax cutting, government shrinking stewardship of Massachusetts was “severely conservative”, conservative magazines and talk radio were skeptical of him, and people like Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich who all endorsed “Romney the conservative” in 2008 were impossibly running against him because he wasn’t a real conservative.
The smears stuck with the ignorant Republican base who bought the smears, seemingly coming from a consensus in Right-wing media, dragging out the primary a half year longer than it needed to be. The self destructive part of this insanity was that the Republican “conservative alternatives” to Romney were anything but. In the 2012 election, the candidates deemed more conservative than Mitt Romney were:
-Newt Gingrich: A twice divorced liberal Republican.
-Rick Perry: A career politician governing the countries 2nd most Conservative state (after Oklahoma) with tax hikes, and a liberal record on illegal immigration.
-Rick Santorum: A former pro-abortion rights politician turned pro-life statist who consistently supported and voted for big government and the welfare state in the senate including debt ceiling increases, Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, funding the “bridge to no where”, and supporting Arlen Spector (who later became a Democrat and became the deciding vote for Obamacare) over Pat Toomey (the conservative PA senator who now resides in Arlen Spectors former seat).
These 3 choices were what was falsely portrayed to the conservative base as being more solidly right-wing than one Mitt Romney: A Washington outsider family man without a shred of impropriety in his entire personal and public life who was a successful businessman that ran the nations 2nd most Leftist state conservatively, never supporting a tax increase, and is largely responsible for getting Scott Brown elected as Republican Massachusetts senator nearly exclusively so he could be the deciding vote against Obamacare.
And for all the conservative misinformation about Romney, it amounted to nothing but damage among moderates – not conservatives, thus losing the election. Romney was able to show conservatives he was and would be one of them, but the negative attacks against him proved to be too much for him to overcome among moderates.
Despite a myth being propagated the day after election day (before total counts were tallied) claiming that 3 million conservatives stayed home – Romney won those votes in historic proportions.
Romney won more conservatives than Conservative demigod Ronald Reagan.
Reagan won a landslide in 1980 with an electorate that was 28% conservative. Romney lost in 2012 with an electorate that was 35% conservative.
Reagan won 78% of conservatives.
Romney won 80% of conservatives.
The difference is that Reagan won moderates.
Romney lost moderates by 16 points.
The reason Romney lost moderates? Because his brand was damaged by his own party. Romney lost moderates and the election because of the conservative in-fighting by desperate less-conservative challengers that included liberal smears against him that his Republican opponents tarnished him with for a full year before the Democrats did…
ATTACKING THEIR EVENTUAL NOMINEE…FROM THE LEFT When a candidate in a primary is on track to win and you don’t want them to, it is natural to pull out all the stops in order to defeat them; however, when squabbling within one political party, it is an insane and deranged tactic to confirm all the talking points of the opposing political party during your in-fighting.
The attacks against Mitt Romney by his fellow Republicans were straight out of the Democrats playbook…
Governor Tim Pawlenty led the way in using the Left’s talking point on the Massachusetts healthcare plan Romney presided over being identical to Obamacare.
Governor Rick Perry used the Lefts talking points on Immigration to smear his own party with exactly the emotional appeal fallacies the left leverages on the issue. Championing push for in-state tuition for illegals in Texas, Perry said “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.” To which Romney shut down by noting “I think if you’re opposed to illegal immigration, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a heart. It means that you have a heart and a brain.”
Former Senator Rick Santorum attacked Romney from the Left on his wealth which Santorum claimed put him out of touch with blue collar families. Santorum attacked Romney for his financial success and his history in the business world, claiming that “America doesn’t need a CEO” (despite conservatives thinking that is exactly what the country needed). Santorum, who is nationally unpopular and has been out of elected office since losing his last election by 18 points, also brazenly attacked Romney as “unelectable” in debates, on Twitter, and through tv commercials attacking the Governor for being awesome in the private sector.
Once again, Romney had the perfect logical and conservative response, noting “If we become one of those societies that attacks success, one outcome is certain – there will be a lot less success.”
Newt Gingrich, the most liberal candidate in the primary, combined Perry and Santorums approaches and attacked Romney from the Left on both economics and immigration. Gingrich smeared Romney from the Left on his work as a businessman and specifically his time at Bain Capital, endorsing a Pro-Gingrich PAC produced documentary titled King of Bain which is a Michael Moore style production filled with emotional appeal fallacies and half truths. Attacking Romney for saying that he would not go rounding up families to deport them but would rather support legal policies that would cause some illegals to “self deport, Gingrich jumped on the Left-wing smear that this made Romney “anti-immigration”. Yet again, Romney shut down his leftist attackers with conservative logic and accuracy in one of my favorite debate smackdowns in history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFSf0H1gEE
It was obvious to any objective observer that Mitt Romney would and should be the 2012 nominee shortly after the primary season began. Not everyone had to like that, but the destructive tactics used against him weren’t necessary either ended up being total failures by failing in every area possible: They did not stop Romney from being the nominee, but did stop him from winning the election. Way to go, idiots. It worked like a charm.
In other words: Mitt Romney won on the issues. The reason he lost the election were because Republicans Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum smeared him with Democratic talking points that stuck.
A STUPIDLY DIVISIVE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA Regardless of political persuasion, you can’t expect the average citizen to be doing independent research on political matters completely on their own. They turn to their like minded commentators for guidance and they were wildly misguided.
The top culprits smearing Romney in the 3 major markets of radio, print, and blogging were:
Mark Levin: talk radio show host who smeared Romney on the radio to his grassroots listeners.
Phillip Klein: columnist at the Washington Examiner who used foolish and cliche talking points in repeated attacks on Romney.
Erik Erikson: founder of RedState.com who perpetuated Romney smears online.
But really, no one else in conservative media helped all that much outside of the astute broadcasters on Salem Radio Network including Dennis Prager (who was fair, despite not initially supporting Romney), Michael Medved (who endorsed Romney early in the primary season) and Hugh Hewitt (a long time Romney supporter who none-the-less was fair to the entire field and refrained from smears and talking points).
With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?
Mitt Romney was the best candidate Republicans had in decades and the party did everything possible to prevent him from winning the election. These conservative grass rooters succeeding in failing.
