Symmetry required it: 2012 american general election thread #2

mitt romney as lucille bluth

http://lucilleandmitt.tumblr.com/

The perfect Republican candidate:

http://cdn.static.ovimg.com/episode/223524.jpg

Charles Pierce on Sully's slash fic:

Oh, Christ, no, there isn't. There wasn't in 2006, or in 2008. Hell, in 1998, the country overwhelmingly told Republicans in the House through the election returns to knock off the impeachment kabuki. They impeached Clinton in the lame-duck session. If the Republican Party were capable of the logical thought you are relying on here, Richard Mourdock wouldn't be a candidate for the Senate and Jim DeMint wouldn't be a power there. The president "they cannot beat again" is also a president they never saw as legitimate — and you know why as well as I do — and who, once re-elected, has a career termination clock ticking almost immediately. The president they cannot defeat again is also the one they can safely ignore.

I really admire your loyalty, Andrew. You took a big gamble among your peers climbing aboard the Obama train in 2008. Unfortunately, the Republican Party is more insane than it was four years ago, and it is possessed of so many centers of independent power that even a historic electoral thrashing would be little more than a speed bump. And, oh, not for nothing, but Reagan really was a pretty terrible president, all things considered. He implanted in our politics crackpot economics from which the Republicans cannot free themselves, and which directly led to the Bush deficits and the pillaging of the national wealth in 2008. He began the endless process by which every Republican president runs up deficits that subsequent Democratic presidents have to spend most of their time in office fixing. If Reagan's lasting legacy is a universe of acceptable policy options that runs from Jim DeMint on the right to Barack Obama on the left, and if it is accepted as axiomatic that "the far left" — Jimmy Carter? Andrew, please — was something from which the Democratic Party needed to be disenthralled by Ronald Reagan, then our range of solutions to the country's many real problems is almost hopelessly inadequate, and Reagan did even more damage than even I thought he did.

[Reagan] began the endless process by which every Republican president runs up deficits that subsequent Democratic presidents have to spend most of their time in office fixing.

if i believe in any conspiracy theory, it's this one. this is the grand plan.

why does Sullivan have a job

he has the ability to apprehend real issues then be wrong about half of them?

he has the ability to make one hundred blog posts every day

I miss the palin conspiracy era, that was fun

i'm more of a morbsian "they're all in thrall of corporations who pull more strings than you can imagine" guy myself, but yeah that feels right

if i believe in any conspiracy theory, it's this one. this is the grand plan.

― goole, Monday, September 24, 2012

otm

Sullivan also has the ability to appear in photos like this:

http://dailydish.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e2017c321c70a2970b-550wi

http://ggsidedocs.blogspot.com.br/2012/09/andrew-sullivan-on-obama.html

and who's the bald guy on the right?

why does Sullivan have a job

― stop swearing and start windmilling (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, September 24, 2012 5:22 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lots of crappy bloggers have jobs, I just don't understand why anyone itt pays attention to what he says

is that genesis?

i stopped doing so a while ago, and it was the palin pregnancy stuff that did it honestly.

I read him for (a) link aggregation (b) he occasionally posts good Pet Shop Boys interviews

iatee u realize youre talking to regular readers of the corner

As a reminder that he once had a brain, let me point you towards Love Undetectable.

arianna is really letting herself go

oh but The Corner's funny. Can't wait for mid October!

oh wait, he's with tina brown at daily beast my bad

yeah idg the ilx corner-fetish either

nobody reads national review!

and no one who did started a band

when I want to know what conservative intellectuals are up to I watch fox news

that seems much more painful that reading the corner imho

that's cuz your hometown lacks:

http://www.hispanicprblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/versailles-miami.jpg

i read thru the corner to get a sense of what conservatives are batting around. and to take commenter temperature. most of the time it's the same shit as everywhere else, just their opposite take on it. every now and again there's something i've never heard of.

they do spend a lot of time and effort hating certain democrats that no democrat i know gives a fuck about. debbie wasserman schultz!

xp yeah who has time for cable??

I don't think its a very good place to get a sense of what conservatives are batting around, is the thing

that's why it's lose-lose, at least if you watch fox news you get the good stuff

what i really wonder is who the hell reads all those 'serious' right-wing journals that arts & letters daily links to -- city journal, et al.

my dad, I think

Bumps-In-The-Road-Gate

“[Obama’s] indication that developments in the Middle East represent ‘bumps in the road’ is a very different view than I have. The president — I can’t imagine saying something like the assassination of ambassadors is a bump in the road, when you look at the entire context: the assassination, the Muslim Brotherhood president being elected in Egypt, 20,000 people killed in Syria, Iran close to becoming a nuclear nation. These are far from being bumps in the road.”

i read NRO to get a sense of what NRO thinks about things bc it's often hilarious

Meanwhile one of the smarter conservatives throws up his hands.

But respect for empiricism and reasoned, intellectually honest debate could ensure that the best critiques would be aired; the best ideas attempted; and the very worst rejected, whatever their provenance.

Except if the provenance is the Democratic party. There's still an insistence there that they're going to push themselves to the right of a party that governs from the center. Why that is he doesn't say.

xpost -- That's so not surprising coming from him, though.

Unleash the Ryan talk, once more.

Last week, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) — who had been so moved during Ryan’s GOP convention speech that he openly wept as his longtime ally spoke — told radio host Charlie Sykes that he thinks Ryan is not being used to his full potential.

Boy I knew Walker was an embarrassing dipshit but I'd missed that detail!

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), an ally of Ryan’s who saw the congressman during his recent visits to Capitol Hill, said there simply isn’t time for Ryan to lay out the complexities of his ideas in a stump speech. He argued that Ryan was doing it right by incorporating a few sentences, but few specifics, on the debt and deficit — and then moving on to other issues that Romney talks about.

“You get a short story — you get a sonnet, a haiku — when you’re on the stump,” Gowdy said. “You don’t get a treatise.”

Ayn Rand I love you--
Oh wait she was atheist
Dammit I fucked up

Marathon I ran
1 hour...no wait I'm wrong
Maybe 2, I think

You get a sonnet -- a sestina, a rondel, a villanelle -- when you're on the st ump

Will read that Conor Friedersdorf piece. Sullivan spends most of the day ridiculing Romney, just like most everyone here (me included) does. If you account for his susceptibility to wild overstatement when first reacting to the news of the day (Romney drops fork = unfit to govern), I find him as worthwhile as anything else I check regularly. Now and again, he'll write something about Republican silliness that's very lucid.

Most of us confine our worship of tough-daddy figures to the gay thread though.

His still-standing Obama swoon is part of what I account for (not exactly in those terms...). Sometimes, like the Newsweek cover, I find it funny. I've never felt the need to use the term trolling before, but that's what that cover headline feels like to me (unintentionally, and whether he wrote it or not)--an attempt to trigger aneurysms in Reagan worshippers.

the comparison's very apt in a way: democrats care about [insert greenwald twitter wall here] about as much as republicans care/cared about his awful record on civil liberties and subversions of the constitution.

agh, how'd that happen? let's try again:

the comparison's very apt in a way: democrats care about obama's (insert greenwald twitter wall here) about as much as republicans care/cared about reagan's awful record on civil liberties and subversions of the constitution.

Apt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b126IDuCkVw

The Friedersdorf piece is good--he makes exactly the same points that Sullivan does day in and day out (to the point of "enough already, I get it").

One more thing I now have to account for: the thought of Sullivan weeping over that Reagan speech. Thanks a lot.