It seems to me, the real victim of this season’s bizarre G.O.P. primary season is Mitt Romney.
Here is a guy who has been running for President for a long, long time. He has executive experience. He has business experience. He has lots and lots of money. He doesn’t look like a troll (think Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich). He doesn’t have a “Google problem.” He isn’t a fucking lunatic teabagger (think Michele Bachmann). He lost the suit. He can recite Snoop Dog lyrics. He never worked for Obama.
Yet, here we are with less than two months to the Iowa Caucuses, and where does Mitt stand? Oh…maybe 30%.
A couple months ago, “George W. Bush on Steroids” jumped into the race and became the instant front-runner—until he proved to have the intellectual capacity of George Bush on paint chips. But Romney still couldn’t break out.
More recently he has been polling neck and neck with a serial sexual harasser whose entire platform is a one-word slogan repeated three times. That is, until the heightened scrutiny caused some ideas twirling around in his head to leak out…or not leak out. And still Romney didn’t break out.
And now he is tied (or even trailing) a serial adulterer, who at one time was the most despised man in U.S. politics. And soon people will remember why. And they will despise him even more for being a lobbyist for Freddie Mac. But Romney will still be shunned by 2/3 of a disappointed pack of Republican voters.
That’s gotta sting.
But nothing will sting more than the stain of trailing behind Rick Santorum in the polls—even if only briefly. And I do believe Santorum is next in line for a fling with increasingly desperate Republicans.
Actually, I think it’s more and more likely that the other Republican contenders (with the likely exception of Huntsman) were encouraged to enter the race for the sole purpose of making Romney look good in comparison. After seeing the lunatic fringe ideas advocated by the others, he looks almost – moderate, more likely to appeal to the general electorate in a campaign against Pres. Obama.
The problem is that he has to survive the Republican nomination process, which really seems to be under the control of the most wacky electorate we’ve experienced since the No-Nothing Party. They don’t like Romney because he’s “too liberal”. But it looks like each has a self-destruct mechanism in place which, like an errant rocket, explodes if it rises too high and goes off-course, thereby threatening the prospects of the heir apparant.
It’s almost humerous the extent to which the Republicans have become the “hypocritical” party.
They run up massive deficits under Bush when they started with a balanced budget and the the economy was moving along at a fair, but not great, pace. Then when the economy crashes and a Democrat is in charge, they can’t stop crying about the deficit and federal debt.
When they were bringing the Clinton impeachment procedings, they shed tears about how Clinton was allegedly guilty of sexual harrassment and had despoiled the integrity of the Oval Office. But now they are seriously considering nominating a serial sexual harrasser to the Presidency, as well as a former Congressmen who left Congress under a cloud of ethics violations and is on his third marriage (and was guilty of adultery while demanding that Clinton be impeached for his own indescretions).
So much for any pretense that the Republicans are the guardians of family values.
So, here’s the problem. In the last election the Republican rules were mostly “winner take all”, which ensured an early end to the contest by Super Tuesday. If that system still holds, it could create an interesting race for delegates.
Romney and Perry have enough money to stay in the race until the end. What if Romney comes in a close second – perhaps with 25% of the vote to 26% spread – with different candidates taking the lead spot in each state. Romney could find himself with no delegates from the caucus and primaries, and only the “Super Delegates” to count on to keep his name in contention in a five-way brokered convention.
Or more likely, Romney will pick up enough delegates with 26% of the vote in each state so that he has the nomination sewn up by early March. What will happen to all those fierce anti-Romney Tea-Partiers? Will they be willing to bury their differences and support the Republican Nominee? Or will one of the candidate mount a third-party challenge? Or perhaps they will just decide to sit out the election in disgust (“There – THAT will teach them for not listening to us!”)
And would ANY of the other candidates consent to serving as a VP nominee with Romney?????
I’m disappointed Darryl..
Few polysyllabic words to get in the way of the “facts”..
Heh. “George Bush on paint chips”…
That’s good.
I was twiddling the AM dial a week or so back and lighted for a painful moment on the Limbaugh show. The caller was accusing the Democrats of maneuvering the Republicans into supporting Romney.. Flush did not protest much at all to my recollection..
Whacky indeed.
Gee, the prospect of a Republican “brokered convention” is rather nice. I’d like their nominee to end up giving his acceptance speech at 2:00 a.m., much like the Democratic nominee was forced to do in 1972.
I enjoy skimming this for how they feel about romney
http://www.freerepublic.com/ta.....b=articles
http://www.freerepublic.com/fo.....0659/posts
Oh, and how do free republic conservatives treat liberals?
How do you have a bi partisan discussion with people who think like that? Can you?
Darryl,
I don’t think rank & file Republicans care whether Gingrich was a “serial adulterer” as this is just the sort of ‘character’ bullshit they fling at their opponents when they’ve got nothing and really don’t care about when it is one of theirs.
And as funny as the insult may be against Romney, I think we should let it go.
No, I think what is HILARIOUS about the likely 2012 GOP Presidential Candidate’s showing in recent polls in New Hampshire is that despite the fact that Newt doesn’t even have a campaign in New Hampshire, Romney, the likely 2012 GOP Presidential Candidate, can barely beat this flawed non-candidate.
The GOP nomination process is a laugh riot TV Reality Show which will nominate a one-time governor of liberal Massachusetts whose signature and only achievement was the legislation with the much hated and ‘unconstitutional!‘ mandate – RomneyCare.
I want to say Romney is the inevitable nominee because the rest of them are stupid, nuts, have baggage, or all three; but with today’s GOP you can’t be sure of anything — I suspect they’re capable of nominating a dead guy who isn’t even a citizen.
http://tinyurl.com/ylk2jb2
Speaking of the No-Nope-Nada-Nothing Party, it looks like we’re going to see automatic spending cuts. The GOP’s negotiators offered Democrats $3 billion of tax increases to offset deep cuts in entitlement programs. They want to raise the rest of the “revenue enhancements” by selling off federal land. (E.g., visualize Mount Rainier National Park as a Donald Trump resort.) Democrats told them to go to hell.
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com.....ittee-plan
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Democrats have the upper hand in this skunk fight, because they don’t need to pass anything in Congress. They can cut $600 billion from the bloated Pentagon budget simply by letting the automatic spending cuts take effect, and they can raise trillions in new revenue simply by letting the Bush tax cuts expire in 2013 — and they can blame the Republicans for middle class tax hikes. With their time-honored strategy of telling Democrats, “Roll over, Fido!” crumbling beneath them desperate Republicans are trying to get the Pentagon exempted from automatic cuts, but they don’t have the votes to make that stick.
Before you eat lobster, you should know this:
“Thousands of men have become permanently disabled working in the unsafe and poorly regulated lobster industry in Honduras. … ‘It’s very difficult when you see very young people paralyzed from the neck down below and you know that they will not improve,’ said Dr. Mejia. …
“Mejia frequently travels to the Miskito Coast, a remote area of Honduras about 200 miles from his clinic where most of his patients live. People here have no electricity or running water. There are few other job opportunities, and most families have at least one male relative who was injured diving for America’s dinners.”
“Some 4,500 divers throughout the Miskito Coast have suffered from dive-related injuries …. Those lucky enough to be healed often return to diving. … They take the risk for a few hundred dollars a month. …
“There are no laws in the U.S. blocking the import of lobster caught by deep sea divers like the Miskito men.”
http://rockcenter.msnbc.msn.co.....sell-to-us
Roger Rabbit Commentary: If you order lobster in a restaurant or buy it at a supermarket, and it comes from Honduras, your dollars are literally killing desperately poor young Honduran men.
Muslims in New York City protested police spying today. They had reason to:
“[Police Commissioner] Kelly and his intelligence chief, David Cohen, have transformed the NYPD into one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. It operates far outside the city borders and its manpower and budget give it capabilities that even the federal government does not have.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45.....news-life/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: If you want to experience first-hand what it feels like to live in a police state like Syria or North Korea, just dye your skin brown, wear a turban, and drive a cab in New York City.
“Top international climate scientists and disaster experts meeting in Africa have a sharp message for the world’s political leaders: Get ready for more dangerous and unpredictable weather caused by global warming.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45.....vironment/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Wingnut warming deniers will cry, “Won’t happen!” Then, when it does happen, they’ll blame Obama. Meanwhile, the Koch brothers are cackling all the way to the bank.
Wall Street has an insensitivity problem not seen since the days of the Tsar.
http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.co.....upys-anger
@14
Plants have a fairly narrow temperature range at which they will germinate and global warming will push the temperatures in the tropics above the point where most of the staple crops of the tropics will germinate. The plus side to this is that wide scale starvation and the unraveling of the modern economy will greatly reduce CO2 output and help bring global warming into check.
@15
Famous last words: let them eat cake. Most of the truly clueless will be dealt with harshly.
I’d bet quite a few of them are toning down their wardrobe, selling the Porsche, and looking for jobs in places like Seattle.
I mean, to a large degree FDR did what he did because if he didn’t do it rich people were going to get shot. Now we have the same types of income inequity that FDR saw, but we also have way more guns in America, those guns are way more deadly, we’ve been fighting two wars for a decade, the bursting of the largest economic bubble in the history of mankind, and we have peak oil and global warming fucking with everything on top of that.
I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I think our chances of coming out of our current mess with some kind of happy ending are getting slimmer and slimmer.
This sounds really drastic and bad, but really it’s a step in the right direction.
For more on what I’ve post @16 please read:
Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats
http://www.amazon.com/Climate-.....038;sr=1-1
The bitter irony for Romney of Herman “art project” Cain and Newton G as front-runners is that, like Sarah Palin, neither are real candidates but are just in this for profit.
Neither have campaign orgs (Newt’s quit in disgust last summer), and as Maddow enjoys pointing out, neither of them bother to campaign as though they really care about winning–with itineraries guided more often by book sales/signing opportunities than political strategy.
Who in their right freaking mind would buy a book by Gringrich???
Who in their right freaking mind would buy a book by Gringrich???
“…polling neck and neck with a serial sexual harasser“
I’m growing tired of hearing these allegations of sexual harassment brought up in such a matter-of-fact way. I’m not dismissing the possibility that he did in fact do those things, but so many people are talking about it as though he’s already been tried and convicted.
What’s striking to me is that so many of the people on the left who have jumped all over Cain these last few weeks are the same people who defended Clinton until the bitter end in the 90’s. And, in all fairness, many of the conservatives who are brushing off the claims against Cain are the same guys that called for Clinton’s impeachment.
I had the same view toward Clinton’s situation as I have toward Cain’s (and Gingrich’s) now: Politicians are just as personally flawed (if not more so) as the rest of us. I know plenty of people that are quite competent at their jobs, even though their personal lives are a complete mess.
If you want to criticize Herman Cain for something, criticize him for his frighteningly limited knowledge of foreign affairs. That pretty much closed the book on Cain for me. As far as I’m concerned, these politicians’ personal lives are something they can take up with their spouses. What really angers me is when a person vying to become the leader of the free world misrepresents their knowledge of foreign policy. In the world we live in, that has the potential to have a much more profound effect on my life than their (allegedly) hyperactive libido ever could.
That settlement payment pretty much says he did it.
Been there done that.
@3 “And would ANY of the other candidates consent to serving as a VP nominee with Romney?????”
Contenders usually aren’t selected for the Veep slot. And ever since Nixon, GOP presidential candidates habitually have chosen third-raters as “impeachment insurance” — they figure if their understudy is an Agnew or a Palin, a Democratic Congress won’t dare impeach them when they violate the Constitution.
re 24:
Q — Ever been caught jerkin’ off in the closet?
A — No!
Punch line — Good hidin’ place, isn’t it?
But seriously, you don’t hear stories like this about Mitt Romney, do you?
Roger Rabbit’s Choose-A-Veep Contest
We can have some fun here trying to guess who Romney’s veep candidate will be. The established rules of the game work like this:
1) The veep must be from a different party of the country than the candidate, and if the candidate is not from the South, then the veep must be from the South;
2) The veep selection must appease the party faction that doesn’t like the candidate, e.g., if the candidate is Romney then the veep must be a Tea Partier;
3) As noted above, the veep must be sufficiently unacceptable to the opposing party as to take impeachment off the table;
4) It helps if the veep has enough congressional experience and stature to help move the candidate’s legislative agenda through Congress (assuming the candidate wins and becomes president);
5) Finally, and obviously, the veep must be someone willing to give up the elective position he or she currently occupies for a job that has no power, prestige, or promotion potential; and can’t be someone who is indispensable in his/her current position.
Okay, within that paradigm, Romney’s options probably include Rubio, Christie, Jindal, or Paul Ryan but not Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, Bachmann, Gingrich, Cain, Huntsman, or Perry.\
I Googled this question and came up with this: “Rubio if he’s serious about winning.” And I also found references to a supposed Romney quote that he wanted “someone like Dick Cheney.”
@24 In order for Cain not to be a sexual harasser, at least four women from diverse backgrounds who previously worked under him and have no known axes to grind have got to be liars. What are the odds of that?
You’re talking about the presidential nominating process as though it were a court of law in which candidates are entitled to a presumption of innocence, evidentiary objections, and trial by jury. Not so. Being president is a PRIVILEGE and a SOLEMN TRUST and voters are entitled to vote for or against a candidate for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all.
If voters decide they want a liar and serial adulterer like Gingrich as their president, they’re entitled to him. If they want a cokehead and drunk like Chimp as their president, they’re entitled to him — although in his case, the voters didn’t choose him, the Wingnut Court did. And we all paid dearly for their mistake, but no one paid more dearly than the 4,000+ young American soldiers who won’t get to be fathers or grandfathers.
I’m reposting #29 because the edit function didn’t work properly and failed to save my edits:
@24 In order for Cain not to be a sexual harasser, at least four women from diverse backgrounds who previously worked under him and have no known axes to grind have got to be liars. What are the odds of that?
You’re talking about the presidential nominating process as though it were a court of law in which candidates are entitled to a presumption of innocence, evidentiary objections, and trial by jury. Not so. Being president is a PRIVILEGE and a SOLEMN TRUST and voters are entitled to vote for or against a candidate for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all.
If voters decide they want a liar and serial adulterer like Gingrich as their president, they’re entitled to him. If they want a cokehead and drunk like Chimp as their president, they’re entitled to him — although in his case, the voters didn’t choose him, the Wingnut Court did. And we all paid dearly for their mistake, but no one paid more dearly than the 4,000+ young American soldiers who won’t get to be fathers or grandfathers because the coke-snorting drunk ensonced in the White House by the Wingnut Court attacked the wrong fucking country after allowing our country to be attacked on 9/11/01 by sleeping on the job.
@21 Strange as it may sound, the best person for the job of POTUS is likely to be someone who doesn’t actually want the job.
@24,
You’ve awfully sensitive feelings (and are a bit of a dim bulb).
Are you sure you’re up for this sort of thing?
I can’t pass this up:
“So the left is hammering Gingrich over his ‘hypocrisy.’ But I can’t figure out what they are talking about.” — pudge on (un)Sound Politics
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Whaddya say, fellow HAers, should we help out poor lil pudgie? Or leave him to wallow in inbred stupidity?
@27
That’s awesome.
@24 “If you want to criticize Herman Cain for something, criticize him for his frighteningly limited knowledge of foreign affairs.”
We did.
“That pretty much closed the book on Cain for me.”
So what do you want, a medal? I mean, good for you and all that, but seriously, isn’t this a no-brainer that even a stupe could figure out?
If you want to know what Herman Cain is really all about, watch this video (you have to scroll down a bit):
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rac.....t-project/
@33
Pudgies really only any good as an object of ridicule.
@28
Rubio’s too crooked for the spot (the whole family’s a pack of thieves). I can’t see Christie liking the #2 spot very much and I’m betting he has designs on the #1 spot, just not this go’round. Unless Christie knows something about his health that he’s not sharing with the rest of us. I’d say Jindal’s probably the one, he’s not a Washington guy. Not sure how the far right thinks about him, though.
To #28: My list doesn’t completely conform to the rules you set, but here’s what I think:
Michele Bachmann: Bobby Jindal
Herman Cain: Marco Rubio
Newt Gingrich: Nikki Haley
Jon Huntsman: Marco Rubio
Ron Paul: Andrew Napolitano
Mitt Romney: Michele Bachmann
Rick Santorum: Bobby Jindal
Note: These aren’t necessarily the VP candidates I would want, just the ones I think would best fit each presidential candidate. Also, I excluded Christie because I don’t think he’d accept.
To #32: What did I say at #24 that made me seem so sensitive? Help me understand (I have a hard time understanding things, being such a dim bulb and all).
@39 “What’s striking to me is that so many of the people on the left who have jumped all over Cain these last few weeks are the same people who defended Clinton until the bitter end in the 90’s.”
Well for starters that’s a pretty damned big assumption you made @24. Have you ever had the ASSUME training? No? Okay, here it is:
When you assume things, you make an ASS out of U and ME.
So, what causes you to ASSUME that we “defended Clinton”? I sure didn’t. The guy got a blowjob under the desk from an employee when he was supposed to be working. If I’d done that on my job, my ass would have been fired. Well, I figure what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and if I’d been a Senator when the vote was taken, I would have voted to fire his ass for that. This is America, egalitarianism, no special privileges based on rank or status, and all that.
We’re dissing on you because you “think” with sound bites instead of brain cells, and the HA mob being an intellectual crowd (lots of professors, doctors, and lawyers on this blog), we frown on that around here.
Does that explanation edify you?
@37 “the whole family’s a pack of thieves”
What Republican isn’t?
@38 I don’t see the logic of a Romney – Bachmann hookup.
He isn’t smart, but he’s not that stupid.
Roger Rabbit won’t be posting tomorrow, Saturday, because he has to hop over to a meeting in eastern Washington. RR is an appointed member of a state policy board, and duty calls.
To #40: I didn’t say that “ALL” of the liberals that are criticizing Cain supported Clinton. I didn’t even say “most”. I said “many”. And I even followed that up by pointing out the hypocrisy of the right-wingers that called for Clinton’s impeachment in the 90’s but are silent on Cain now.
So there.
“I’d bet quite a few of them are toning down their wardrobe, selling the Porsche, and looking for jobs in places like Seattle.”
Funny you should mention that. Now, evidently you haven’t hung around Blah-Vue much, where that big Maserati sedan seems to be surprisingly popular, but….
We sold a car to someone else’s insurance company last month, and we’ve been entertaining the possibility of replacing it with a diesel of some sort rigged to run on fryer grease. So, I’ve been checking the Craigslist auto pages lately searching on “Mercedes”. What I’ve discovered is that although Benzes in general have a reputation for lasting something in excess of forever, by the time they get to be 7-10 years old it seems they’ve lost about 90% of their original value. Meanwhile, the lowly Hyundais and Subarus that old still command as much as half their original price if they’ve logged significantly less than 100,000 miles.
@44 I don’t see a lot of GOPers being “silent” about Cain. Mostly they’re blaming his victims at the top of their lungs.
@45 That would make a Benz the vehicle of choice for conversion to fryer grease (which, by the way, doesn’t have any fuel taxes on it — you’d think the tax-evading wingnuts would jump all over that!)
I’m sure you know this, but I’ll reiterate it for our wingnut friends: Rudolf Diesel originally designed his engine to run on peanut oil — and it did. In his day, nobody had a clue about how much oil was in the ground.
@44 I’ll give you credit for this: You’re willing to “close the book” on Cain because he doesn’t know a fucking thing about foreign affairs. That’s more than HA’s other trolls are willing to do. Their standard MO is to concede nothing, no matter how compelling the evidence against them. So you and I apparently agree on something: The presidency is not an entry-level job and is no place for political amateurs. Good for you. We could use more trolls like you.
Many of us HA regulars have been complaining about the crappy trolls we get on this board. Maybe we’ve finally got a live one. This newby shows a bit of promise. Don’t misinterpet; that doesn’t, of course, mean we’re going to be kind to him. Verbally kicking the shit out of trolls is what we live for.
The Evil / Corrupt / Insane Klown Posse (aka the R presidential field) is insulting.
But let’s give the fuckers the benefit of the doubt: they aren’t intentionally insulting us. Which means, FSM help us, they and their base don’t know any better.
But the really sad and scary thing: about 45% of “us” will still vote for one of the Klowns, whichever bozo happens to “win” the R nomination.
Mr. Hard:
I’m pretty sure most of us here have a jaundiced view of Bill Clinton at best. Personally I detest him (and Al Gore) for setting up the conditions for the National Gang Rape that was the Bush Administration of the ‘oughts.
But the fact is, by all accounts, Bill’s daliance was consensual. Cain’s alleged actions border on sexual assault.
I almost never respond to a troll here but I do appreciate your attempt to be (relatively) polite.
So, just for the record, which member of the Klown Posse do you support?
That would be “Zotz” @50, 51.
@23: I can’t imagine. If you’ve ever heard the titles of his films and books, it’s hard to say many of them without giggling or feeling slightly embarrassed, a niche audience for sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N....._and_books
@31: There is something to what you’re saying, but certainly no good can come from a POTUS who is in it to promote his/her books and movies, and to cash in on speaking fees.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....02742.html
If voters decide they want a liar and serial adulterer like Clinton as their president, they’re entitled to him.
@31: There is something to what you’re saying, but certainly no good can come from a POTUS who is in it to promote his/her books and movies, and to cash in on speaking fees.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb.....refix=bara
Watching Men in Black. The big board of aliens on earth flashed by and it has Newt’s picture.
That explains a few things.
Once again Roger DOPEY Rabbit doesn’t get it.
Gennifer Flowers – Arkansas State Police visits
Juanita Broderick – FBI guy writes a book about it among other things
Kathleen Willey – While Clinton in whitey house
Paula Jones – Oops yep I did have sex with that woman at a cost of $850K!
Now who defended him?
Liberal Media
Peeps on HA said it was only about sex
CBS News 60 Minutes
George Steponallofus – Attacked Cain on ABC
James Bimbo Eruptions Carville
Bill Press comparing the Cain allegations to the Penn State Sex Scandal
Lib Media and Clintonistas attacking Ken Starr
WA Post 1994 Editorial Board Defends Clinton and attacks Cain
Even CBS correspondent Jan Crawford admitted the lib MSM didn’t cover the REAL Clinton sex story as much as these “allegations”.
Now we see Karen Kraushaar, one of the Cain accusers, accused an Immigration and Naturalization Service manager of circulating a sexually charged email. In return she demanded a raise which she got between $12K and $16K to shut her up. Now why wasn’t this covered on HA?
This is why Roger DOPEY Rabbit is a dope on a rope!
Yeah Zotz, ask Kathleen Willey about that!