A source close to Trump stressed that the president-elect’s team is
willing to work with Republicans who backed Trump’s rivals in the GOP
primary, and even those who occasionally called out Trump — but added
that some crossed a line.
“It’s one thing not to have been for him or to have had a
disagreement, but if you went out of your way to be an asshole, then
we’re not going to helpful,” the source said.
The source suggested that Trump’s political operation would steer
business away from Republicans who were involved in the #NeverTrump
effort to block Trump from the GOP nomination. Comparing one of the
effort’s leading operatives to a Hollywood actor who threatened to leave
the country if Trump was elected, the source said, “Katie Packer should
see if Bryan Cranston has an extra room in Canada.”
Packer responded by cracking that she “fully expected to be rounded
up and sent to a detention camp, so if that's the best they've got, then
that's a relief!” More seriously, she suggested that “if Trump allows
sentiments like that to go unchecked,” it will undermine his claim
during his victory speech early Wednesday that he wants to unite the country after the divisive election.
Ha ha nobody's getting "rounded up and sent to a detention camp," right? Right?
(CNN)Former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich is calling for the creation of a new House Committee on
Un-American Activities, invoking the infamous "Red Scare"-era
congressional body as a blueprint for weeding out American ISIS
adherents and sympathizers.
Oh ok that's never gotten out of control or anything. Pretty sure Republican consultants who happen to be on the outs with the administration will be safe.
Kind of a rocky night for Mitt but he still comes out of Super Tuesday with the advantage. It's been interesting to see Santorum challenge.. but not quite knock off.. Romney in Michigan and now Ohio. I think Santorum's ability to appeal to disaffected rust belt voters using the same kind of superficial wrong-headed identity politics Republicans have been appealing to that demographic with since Reagan might make him a better challenger to Obama than Mitt will be. But, as I've said dozens of times, Santorum will not be the nominee... even if he does convince Newt to shut up. And what are the odds of that happening, anyway?
I don't get it. I just don't fucking get Mitt Romney at all.
Don't get me wrong--I don't understand the idea of wanting to be president at all. It's tons of work, there's never really a fucking second when you're NOT on the job, at least a hundred million people who you're technically supposed to represent are going to hate every fucking thing you do, and there's the possibility that you'll be the person responsible for incinerating half the people on the globe at any given moment. So, yeah--shitty, shitty job.
But back to Romney. Of all the fuckers in my life who have run for president, I understand him least of all.
He's got all the charisma of a comatose iguana, and he's trying to be a politician. But there he is, trying like hell to get elected to the highest office in the land.
And the hell of it is, the guy's got, like, a quarter of a BILLION fucking dollars, and he's been running for president non-stop for the last ten years. President of the United States is one of the least fucking desirable jobs in the entire world (see above), and he's been after it for a decade.
Dude. Take a fucking vacation.
Is it really even remotely conceivable that any person could actually both 1) want to be President of the United States and not 2) also be a severely sociopathic menace to himself and others? The immediate response that comes to mind is, well no clearly there is no other way to explain these people. But to answer in this way is also to admit that we willingly allow ourselves to be ruled by the most hollow and least human among us. Why do we even bother at all?
It helps a bit if we think of Presidential candidates as what they really are. Let's remember that the emotionally damaged individual delivering the speeches and posing for the pictures is but one element of a mega-conglomeration of consultants, lobbies, professional associations, industries, money launderers, murderers, and thieves elbowing its way around the halls of power in search of favors. The candidate himself/herself is really just the brand. Kind of the way the Pillsbury Doughboy is just an imaginary mascot for a division of General Mills Newt Gingrich* is just a hollow ad for a slightly different brand of the GOP power mill.
So try to keep focused on who and what is behind each candidate rather than on just who the candidates themselves appear to be. Otherwise we spend all season meaninglessly probing the psyches of the sorry souls who allow themselves to be used as hollow props by the machines they represent. We already know what such people are, don't we? They're the living example of their own professed belief in corporate personhood.
*I am aware of that Newt may in fact be merely an imaginary mascot for Newt Gingrich Publishing and Punditry INC which is only a slight variation on the point I'm trying to make. Regardless, he is indisputably doughy.
“My legacy, my life, has been ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ ” Mr. Sullivan told the Chicago Sun-Times, which reported about the legal action on Monday. “Those copyright laws are there to protect people like me who are lucky enough to create a copyright. ‘Eye of the Tiger’ is an iconic copyright. It’s become a lifelong legacy — something you want to pass down to your kids.”
Suggested revised headline: "Man not at all ashamed of horrible song he still accepts money for having created"
Asked by CNN moderator John King whether he would follow his father, former presidential candidate George Romney, and release more than a decade of returns, Romney was noncommittal.
“Maybe,” he said, prompting boos and jeers from the audience. “I don’t know how many years I’ll release.”
I was out while Newt was answering the question about his ex-wife with a prolonged "Fuck You," but my open relationship with this campaign allows that sort of thing. By the time I got to my TV, Newt was on to telling us about his big thinking about doing big things which is okay since we already know he's a big person.
Let's see, what else?
Mitt attacked Newt for having only 4 years experience as Speaker compared to Mitt's 25 years experience in business. But if you score it in terms of damage done to people's lives, it all works out kind of evenly. Maybe he should have converted to dog years.
Mitt also told us something about being, "from the real streets of America," video evidence of which is provided below.
Paul and Santorum held an elevated discussion on the merits of putting more Americans out of work so as to depress the price of the consumer goods they won't be manufacturing and so won't be able to afford anyway. I think Santorum even suggested more tax credits to "make American manufacturers competitive" or something like that. Perhaps he meant for them to be able to purchase suicide nets.
Mitt and Newt both seemed eager to outsource immigration enforcement to Visa and Mastercard.
Paul appeared to suggest that abortions happen because money is fungible before concluding that "South Carolina is known for its respect for liberty" which was almost as funny as Newt's closing plea that we vote for him as a means to avoid "radicalism."
The bobbleheads are all saying that Newt and Santorum "won" this debate. Whatever that means, it's pretty obvious that Mitt lost.. or at least looked (even) worse than he had in the 70 previous such appearances. Anyway, I'm going to change the channel now so I don't have to listen to Erick Erickson talk anymore. I suggest you do the same.
In 1999, after refusing to take the seat he won in the 1998 elections, Newt Gingrich left his second wife, Marianne, for a much-younger staffer with whom he’d been having an almost-ignored affair. As in his first marriage, he did so shortly after Marianne was diagnosed with a serious illness; as in his first divorce, he fought Marianne tooth and nail over any financial settlement. And then he had the Atlanta archdiocese inform Marianne that their marriage was invalid in the eyes of his fiancée’s faith; 9 years later, he completed his conversion to Catholicism.
I shall fall Like a bright exhalation in the evening, And no man see me more -- Henry VIII Act 3 Scene 2
If we go into the caucuses with Paul as the crazy candidate of choice and Gingrich on the wane, it's entirely plausible that Mitt can show relatively well as a "second choice" candidate. The theory being that since all of the crazy candidates are now past their moments, most caucusers who are denied the one crazy candidate they choose first won't just grab the next crazy available but will shrug and go to Mitt. Even if many do go for Crazy #2 it's difficult to imagine there being much consensus on who that is which also is a situation that looks good for Mitt. The other possibility is a late coalescing around Perry as Crazy #2 which could still happen.
Now that so many so-called establishment conservatives andself-appointed Tea Party spokespersons are coming out of the woodwork to clobber Newt from all sides, do we still think he's got a legit shot at becoming the GOP nominee?
Also here's Moseley's latest bit of handicapping which once again emphasizes the likelihood of "surprises" even going so far as to suggest that those of us who continue to expect the utterly unsurprising result of Mitt as the nominee go put some money down on it at Intrade. I'm guessing $10,000 is the standard ante there.
Actually Intrade is kind of a goofy toy. It reflects the volatile conventional groupthink that has fed the boom-and-bust GOP primary cycle. And, although, political junkies love to cite it in discussions like this, it's important to remember that this is precisely what makes it a pretty crappy predictor of results. Don't get me wrong. It's a lot of fun to play with. Although I should say my favorite new toys this election season are these mouse-over sliding poll average graphics at TPM.
Anyway, suffice to say, Intrade is great but it's no Punditbook.
One point of clarification I should make about the GOP Primary so far is that I've always thought Mitt was going to be the nominee, not because of some conspiratorial "rigging" of the system but because I just always thought he was obviously the only candidate without huge fatal flaws. (This is not to say that he doesn't have huge flaws, just not huge fatal flaws.) So the boom-and-bust game the press has been playing of "let's pretend crazy candidate X has a shot this week" has been grating on me.
Anyway, getting back to Mark's latest column, he describes, there, a couple few scenarios for the way things can play out in the coming months including this one.
Alarmed at Gingrich’s surprising ascent, the conservative establishment torpedoes Gingrich before the Iowa caucus. Another “non-Romney” candidate takes his place. In my mind, Perry fills the bill here, because he has the money to buy himself a second look and a talented staff who can attempt to reinvent him. Perry rebrands himself as the “faith” candidate who will best protect us from gays in the military, and the secular culture’s war on Christmas.
Given their definitions of what constitutes a fantasy character, I'm starting to think that Newt Gingrich and Alan Richman could get together and put on the worst role playing game ever.
Below is a comment I intended to publish beneath this Mark Moseley Lens column but, once again, the Lens spam filter has eaten my submission. Or at least I'm assuming that's what keeps happening. Ordinarily this wouldn't bother me but if they're going to publish a column that specifically calls me out for having my judgement clouded by "reflexive cynicism" it seems like they should allow me to respond in that forum. Luckily, since this is not the first time this has happened, I had the presence of mind to copy and paste the response here just in case.
UPDATE: The Lens spam monster has been made to regurgitate the lost missive. Read this anyway. It has marginally more stuff.
Because this is a comment addressed to a specific author and I don't feel like cleaning it up much, it won't make much sense unless you read Moseley's piece first. But not everybody will do that so, just to sum it up, it's a look at the GOP Presidential field as it presently stands with an emphasis on the supposedly "unpredictable fluid dynamics" that have characterized it so far and an implicit refutation of my repeated assertion that such "dynamics" are a basically meaningless sideshow. In the process of developing this point, Moseley represents some of my commentary on the 2008 elections in a.. well.. incomplete way that happens to be convenient to his argument. I try to clear some of that up below. Moseley criticizes me for making imprecise electoral forecasts where the point of such exercises is much more to describe the political climate rather than predict it. He also presents us with the remarkable assertion that Mitt Romney "benefits from being a smart, poised candidate who is not prone to gaffes" which is funny because,
and also
And so forth and the like.
Anyway here's what the Lens ate this time.
First, let's clear this up. "Discounted Obama's chances to win" is one way to put it, although you'll recall the bulk of my criticism of Obama and his supporters (I called them "cultists" They were greatly insulted by this) was that they were presenting us with a Pepsi commercial instead of a meaningful opposition campaign and so were setting themselves up to be greatly disappointed by what I was already calling the "Clinton II Administration" My core assertion where it regarded Obama wasn't so much concerned with whether of not he could win as much as that it wouldn't matter if he did. As much as I adore saying "I told you so" I'm not even sure I have to do that now. The Health Care "reform" brought to you by PHarma and the non-recovery brought to you by the Geithner-Summers Rubinite Administration basically speak for themselves.
I'll give you this much. During the early stages of Campaign 2008, I did indeed expect Rudy! to be the candidate around which the inevitable "Law and Order" resentment vote would crystallize. I was wrong about that, sure. But only for reasons similar to those that made many observers wrong about Perry this time around (For the record, I wasn't on the Perry train this time.) If I have one fault it's one I share with a lot of observers in that I look too closely at previous years' elections for an appropriate analog to the present one. In 2008, I was looking for Nixon and saw Rudy. This year, I think a lot of people were looking for W and saw Perry. Maybe I'm looking at the way the GOP eventually just gave up and settled on McCain last time around when I talk about Mitt but that's not all I'm doing.
I disagree with your characterization of my analysis as reflexive cynicism. What I'm mostly trying to express is exasperation with the false drama created during each election cycle as the info-tainment industry attempts to write a brand new a-historical soap opera out of whole cloth where the present candidates and the policies or interest groups they might represent are de-contextualized from even their very recent past.
The "process" then becomes a meaningless pretend time where we are forced by our scribes and heralds to consider questions to which we've long known the answers as though they're completely new things under the sun. "What about this flat-tax, proposal? Has anyone ever considered such a thing?" they ask breathlessly. "Wow! Newt thinks children should be made to work as janitors! Why has no one tried this before?" It's a stupid stupid TV show that any 12 year old should feel insulted to have been presented with.
Sure we can think of the meaningless plot developments within this silly soap opera as dynamic "unscripted moments" but only in the same way we expect such from so-called reality TV. A character does something outrageous or momentarily embarrassing. Very entertaining, but does it change anything? Probably not. On Jersey Shore they're just holding your attention long enough to sell you an energy drink or a spray-on tan or something. In American Kabuki Politics, they're just selling you more of the crap status quo money trust oligarchy you're living under. (Or if John Boehner is involved, also spray-on tans)
And the 2012 GOP Primary show is selling you Mitt Romney. Mitt is the guy the money trust most wants, he's the product they're trying to launch here. Everything else is just pretty crap to look at.
I can't accept Newt as the nominee for this reason. He can't beat Obama in a one-on-one race. Now, a three of four way race with your Bloombergs and Roemers and such floating around there might be a different story. What I'm kind of hoping for, in fact, is a race where Buddy Roemer runs on the "Citizens Elect" ticket and puts Newt in but all the asshole mainstream Democrats blame Nader anyway.
On the one hand, it makes perfect sense for the representative of a majority black district to seek inclusion in the Congressional Black Caucus. It could be an honest attempt to put himself in position to best serve his constituents. Oyster has often marveled at Cao's "brilliant naivety" or something like that. Maybe that's what this is.
