Here’s another entry in the Bad Lip Reading soundbites. This isn’t as good as the Rick Perry classic, but it’s still funny.
Santorum might as well adopt the “I’m crazy and I’m right” as his campaign slogan. I still believe Perry could have turned his campaign around if he would have just said that we need to “save a pretzel for the gas jets” during one of the debates.
There’s no joy watching Mitt Romney’s march toward the GOP nomination. The man is uninspiring. I won’t hold that against him. In 2008, Barack Obama was inspiring, but no one knew what they were inspired to do. It was campaign about nothing. Not only is Mitt Romney uninspiring, he talks in the same platitudes as Obama. It’s a campaign about “believing in America.” What the hell does that even mean? As usual, Mark Steyn sums it all up better than I can.
Romney’s is a benevolent patrician’s view of society: The poor are incorrigible, but let’s add a couple more groats to their food stamps and housing vouchers, and they’ll stay quiet. Aside from the fact that that kind of thinking has led the western world to near terminal insolvency, for a candidate whose platitudinous balderdash of a stump speech purports to believe in the most Americanly American America that any American has ever Americanized over, it’s as dismal a vision of permanent trans-generational poverty as any Marxist community organizer with a cozy sinecure on the Acorn board would come up with.
After half-a-century of evidence, what sort of “conservative” offers the poor the Even Greater Society?
Mitt Romney will be raked through the coals for his comments about not caring for the poor, but the deeper issue is that “safety nets” have helped create this mess. It’s not just the safety net for the poor, but it’s the safety nets for everyone. The nation is running a textbook example of moral hazard. If there’s no incentive not to fail what’s the incentive to succeed? Over the last 30 years consumption is up 50% among the very poor in the United States. Oh, to be poor in the United States of America in 2012! I believe in America!
The goal of any conservative should be to do things to encourage economic growth. Ultimately that helps the poor more than a safety net. If Mitt Romney’s idea of leadership it be a caretaker for a nation staggering towards insolvency then what’s the point in defeating the President? Obama’s policies will simply help us get to a dystopian Mad Max version of the state much faster. Let’s give Obama the second term that Jimmy Carter was never able to have.
It appears that Romney is trying to plot the same course to the White House that Obama used in 2008. The Romney strategy is to say nothing for the next ten months and hope the other guy is so unpopular that he wins by default. If Romney is unable to convey any kind of real message now why does anyone think he’ll be a good President? What is Romney’s big idea? What does he intend to do when he’s elected? I’ve been following this closely for months and I can’t tell you a single specific thing that Romney intends to do to solve our fiscal crisis.
What do I know about Romney? He likes to fire people, he believes in America, and he’s not worried about the very poor. Awesome!
Such is the plight of the race obsessed that in the absence of any George Wallace rhetoric Democrats are inventing new racist rhetoric. Four years ago I wrote about how Dallas city Commissioner John Wiley Price claimed that the term “black hole” was racist. What? Racism is real, it exists, and the nation (and the world) has an embarrassing history in regards to race. It’s one thing to be sensitive and it’s another to be obsessed.
I’m all for exposing racial bigotry. It shouldn’t be tolerated in politics today. That’s why I don’t have time for Jesse Jackson. When Jackson goes around telling people they’re “not black enough” there’s a problem. In October, 2011, Juan Williams was fired from NPR for making “insensitive” comments about Muslims. Shouldn’t Mr. Williams be cognizant about the stupidity of “veiled racism?” Apparently not…
The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”
The code also extends to attacks on legal immigrants, always carefully lumped in with illegal immigrants, as people seeking “amnesty” and taking jobs from Americans.
But the code sometimes breaks down.
I didn’t know that blacks didn’t respect the Founding Fathers. Or that the “entitlement society” was racist. Most people on food stamps are white as are most people who make up the “entitlement society.” Also, the Republicans in this race have gone through painstaking detail about immigration. It would be very difficult to characterize Romney’s or Gingrich’s position as anti-immigration. Mr. Williams finishes his rant with this head scratcher:
The problem is not a lack of work ethic on the part of the poor, who are disproportionately minorities. The problem is there are few good jobs for blue-collar people with the best work ethic.
The problem is a lot more complicated than the lack of good jobs. There will never be “good jobs” for unskilled and uneducated people. I wish people like Juan Williams would get over all this racist crap and start talking about real problems. There’s an increasing number of unskilled and uneducated people. The common denominator with most of these people isn’t race, it’s family, or more accurately, the lack of it. Out of wedlock births are the underlying cancer of our society. For every feel-good story you see on CNN about a single mother who raised her kids there are 15 stories of tradegy.
Racism didn’t create this problem. Racism isn’t perpetuating the problem.
Last week I declared that Mitt Romney would win the GOP nomination. Nothing has changed my mind since last Saturday. Romney hasn’t sealed the deal yet, but Gingrich is crashing and the former governor should win Florida on Tuesday. At this stage it would take something incredible to keep us from an Obama versus Romney match-up.
Much will be written about head to head polls between Romney and Obama, but I’m here to tell you that they don’t matter. Ronald Reagan trailed Jimmy Carter by over 30 points six months before the election. President Obama trailed John McCain two months before the election. President Obama will be judged on his record and on the economy. Say what you want about Mitt Romney, but trying to brand him as an extremist will not work.
Mitt Romney is boring. He’s not quite as robotic and uncharismatic as John Kerry, Al Gore, or Bob Dole, but it’s not a stretch to compare him to those gentlemen. Romney is the steady hand. He’s the guy you call when everything else has failed. In other words, he’s the guy who will beat Obama if the economy doesn’t improve before November.
President Obama’s problem is that people have tuned out. Obama has no plan to make the economy better. He’s out of ideas. After all the adulation and all the grand speeches, what is Obama’s core conviction? Sure, the liberals still love him, but they loved Clinton. Democrats are a loyal bunch. It’s a collection of voter blocs. Give us your subsidies, affirmative action, unions, trial lawyers, hand-out recipients and those who’ve been brainwashed into believing that abortion is the ultimate civil liberty. The Democrats love to pat themselves on the back for their diversity, but no one is immune from the pandering hand outs. That is why the Democrats are fundamentally opposed to reducing the size of goverment.
If you reduce the size of goverment the Democrats would suddenly have issues with their voting base. Can any argue otherwise? How many people on food stamps vote for Democrats? Wouldn’t it bad for Democrats if any of the people dependent on the goverment could take care of themselves? So President Obama is out of ideas. If he allows pipelines, invests in real energy, or really reduces the size of the goverment he would be hurting his political party.
In the grand scheme of things far too many people are dependent on the goverment. It will be nearly impossible to roll back the tide. However, there aren’t enough dependents to keep Obama from losing. If gas prices go up over the summer Obama could lose in a landslide. The Republicans could have a super majority in the Senate. That would be the true test of our goverment. Would the Republicans have the guts to starve the beast? It will be very unpopular. Look how the union thugs in Wisconsin have behaved. Liberals and conservatives have very different ideas about the role of goverment. The reckoning is here.
I had hope that Obama would be a president that transformed the debate in the United States. Instead, he made things worse. He loves to talk about himself except when he’s blaming others. I don’t dislike the President. He seems like a nice guy. Most Americans like the 44th president, but that doesn’t mean they think he should continue.
Will Mitt Romney be any better? I doubt it, but could he be any worse?
Over the past four years it’s been widely speculated that Matt Drudge has a soft spot for Mitt Romney. No one knows the real story, but there’s little doubt that Mr. Drudge is in an all out offensive against Newt Gingrich this week at the Drudge Report. For Mitt Romney Florida might be the most important election of his life. If he wins he stops the Gingrich surge (at least for now), but a loss would be a terrible blow.
Perhaps that’s why Drudge is on the offensive.
Last night in Tampa, Florida was another horrible debate. Brian Williams asked a series of pointless questions about sugar subsides, manned missions to Mars, and the candidate’s “path to the nomination.” I’m not going to go into it any further detail because we’ve written about these dumb leftist moderators ad nauseum. Who can be shocked that Brian Williams turned in another Gossip Girl performance?
The most obvious change in last night’s debate was the audience. There was no cheering or jeering. I prefer the hushed tones instead of the near gladiator style debates that were held in South Carolina. These are supposed to be debates and not an angry mob scene. Newt Gingrich is threatening to pull out of the remaining debates if the crowd continues to be silenced. It’s understandable that Gingrich prefers the red meat style debate audiences since he’s basically carved a path to the nomination by seizing the heart of the mob.
In 2008, I thought that the Democrats brainless adulation of Barack Obama could never be topped, but the rise of Newt Gingrich is at least a close 2nd. Americans are increasingly skipping the details and settling for the narrative. You see this in almost every avenue of American culture. We are prisoners of the moment.
During the height of the Lewinsky scandal Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote that “the American presidency is viewed worldwide as a rough equivalent of the Jerry Springer show.” That was over thirteen years ago. A lot has changed since then. Apparently so has the attitudes of conservative voters. South Carolina looks set to give Gingrich a victory today in their state primary. The outcome isn’t likely to stop Romney from winning the nomination, but it says a lot about how much the GOP has changed since the Lewinsky days. Being a debate showman is a lot more important than moral character.
This week was the perfect storm for the Gingrich campaign. Such is the disdain for the mainstream press by the average GOP voter that they rallied around Gingrich when his ex-wife launched a scathing attack against the former Speaker of the House. The South Carolina crowd cheered when Gingrich summoned his best angry response at the most obvious question in the world.
Was it really that shocking that CNN’s John King asked a question about the biggest campaign story at the time? Such is the disdain for President Obama that Republican voters a hungry for a candidate to stick it to the President. That’s never going to happen in the current presidential debate format and it’s causing people to overlook how bad it would be if Gingrich won the nomination.
Gingrich’s response to King’s question correctly pointed out that no one is perfect. President Clinton said as much thirteen years ago. Everyone has dirty laundry of some kind, but Gingrich has over thirty years of dirty laundry, ethics violations, and high profile meltdowns. Shouldn’t GOP voters be concerned about character?
Wouldn’t a Gingrich administration be the very definition of the Jerry Springer show? The GOP rallied around Herman Cain when his sexual harassment allegations surfaced, but it eventually killed his campaign. The big loser this week is Rick Santorum. Gingrich’s surge will eventually end and Romney will win the nomination. Republicans need to realize that every time dirt surfaces on a GOP politician it’s not part of some elaborate left wing conspiracy.
Last June I wrote that time was running out for candidates to get in the race. In the case of Texas Governor Rick Perry he waited far too long to get in race. Perry bowed out of the race today after getting trounced in Iowa and New Hampshire. While political junkies wring their hands over the next two weeks the race is already over. Newt Gingrich may surge, but Mitt Romney has been running for president for six years. The Romney campaign is a well oiled machines with boots on the ground in every major state.
This system of selecting the president is not what the founding fathers intended. To be a serious candidate for president you have to have millions of dollars in infrastructure. The other issue is exposure. For candidates entering the race late the media scrutiny is intense (unless you’re a Democrat). In 2008, then Senator Obama seemingly came out of nowhere, but he had been receiving glowing press since 2004. There was no question he was going to run for president in 2008. Part of the reason why people like Romney and Gingrich seem to have escaped all their political baggage is because it’s old news. Romney has RomneyCare, but what else is there to write about it? Voters have short memories.
For those who were getting to know Rick Perry in the fall of 2011 there was a lot to digest. Perry’s ideas about immigration hurt his chances, but that was nothing compared to what happened next. For those unfamiliar with Perry the first impression of the governor of Texas was his weak debate performances. Then November 9th happened. There’s absolutely no way to recover from that kind of brain freeze especially if you’re trying to introduce yourself to the American public.
So here we are two days from the South Carolina primary and there’s no true conservative in the race. It’s basically Romney versus Gingrich. Santorum is still in the race, but he’s almost irrelevant. If Gingrich pulls out a win in South Carolina it’s unlikely he’ll win in Florida, Nevada and Maine. The race is over and Mitt Romney is the nominee.
It was encouraging yesterday to see so many citizens up in arms about new internet regulation proposed by Congress. It was an odd coalition of liberals and conservatives. Liberals who have no problem regulating all other aspects of our lives draw the line at abortion and the internet. Those against the legislation have offered all manner of nightmare scenarios if it’s passed. The same thing could be said about any goverment regulation. Just wait until ObamaCare starts wrecking the health care system.
Defeating SOPA is important, but on the list of problems facing the country it ranks pretty low. The fact that more Americans aren’t up in arms about our lurch to bankruptcy is really depressing. What good is defeating SOPA if we’ll all be too poor to worry about the internet in 15 years? The people of my generation have no idea how close we are to complete financial collapse. If they did understand they’d be demanding a complete goverment overhaul.
Meanwhile, President Obama used the distraction of SOPA to block the Keystone XL pipeline. For a president who is supposedly serious about helping the economy it’s a comical move. The far left is is against oil and apparently against progress. There’s really no logical reason to oppose the pipeline. The environmental dangers are no larger than the thousands of miles of pipelines already in existence. The extreme left in this country is fundamentally opposed to oil because they’re ignorant when it comes to energy.
I blame stupid commercials like the one above. Where hell do people think electricity comes from? If we all drive electric cars there will be more demand for electricity. Electricity comes from coal, oil, and some nuclear plants. The idea the electricity is “green” is some fantasy. More electric cars means more electricity from oil and coal. That means more expensive energy because the left is fighting all investment in oil. That’s why the president blocked a move that would create thousands of jobs and it’s the reason the left is barrier to economic progress.
I had a long boring post about where it went wrong for Huntsman, but like his candidacy it’s long gone. WordPress ate it and my motivation to write it again. Next time Huntsman should run an honest campaign and quit insulting potential voters. It’s too bad. Huntsman was a pretty good conservative in Utah. He just didn’t seem to want to admit it.
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