PMC Commentary

I'll have what Dick's having

I'll have what Dick Morris is having.

In a hysterical Hill column entitled "Here comes the landslide," Morris suggests that Mitt Romney possesses a reasonably firm hold on--get this--344 electoral votes. "Or," writes the former Clinton adviser, whom another Clinton adviser, George Stephanopoulos, openly refers to as a "cocksucker" in his White House memoirs, "will the Romney momentum grow and wash into formerly safe Democratic territory in New Jersey and Oregon?" If so--and yes, Dick, yes, we believe, we really, really believe!--it's a Romney White House, by 365-173.

Oh, by the way, we're also going to have another 53-47 Senate. Except this one will favor, naturally, you know who.

Yes, I'll definitely have what Dick's having.

With Christie, one can't be too cynical

Steve Kornacki writes that ...

It’s too cynical to say that Christie is executing a devious strategy designed to undermine Romney at the last minute, thereby assuring that the GOP presidential nomination will be open in four years.

On the other hand,

it’s fair to point out that, realistically speaking, Christie’s White House aspirations depend on a Romney loss next week.

Let's see if from this ponderous conflict we can't formulate a synthesis: It's fair to say that, realistically speaking, Christie is executing a devious strategy designed to undermine Romney, since the former's White House aspirations depend on a Romney loss next week.

There. That's about right. And Steve, I don't feel the least bit cynical, realistically speaking.

Seven out of Eight

Here's Political Wire's latest roundup of swing-state polls. With one exception, see any commonality?

Ohio: Obama 50%, Romney 45% (Quinnipiac)
Fla: Obama 48%, Romney 47% (Quinnipiac)
Iowa: Obama 50%, Romney 45% (PPP)
Mich: Obama 48%, Romney 45% (Detroit News)
Penn: Obama 48%, Romney 44% (F&M)
Virg: Obama 49%, Romney 47% (Quinnipiac)
Virg: Romney 49%, Obama 44% (Roanoke)
Wisc: Obama 51%, Romney 46% (PPP)

Why of course. It's Romney's Big Mo!

The WSJ takes on the WSJ

"Big Storm Opportunism" indeed. That's the title of a Wall Street Journal editorial that purports to expose "The larger liberal fallacy ... that effective government requires bigger government."

Such is the largest chestnut of ideological arguments from the right, but in this case--the case of disaster relief--the WSJ's editorial board forgot that just eight paragraphs earlier they had observed: "Regarding the budget for FEMA ... Mr. Obama's own fiscal 2013 budget sought $10.008 billion. That was a cut of $641.5 million, or 6.02%, from fiscal 2012." What the Stay Puft Marshmallow President of ravenous socialism, according to the WSJ, was doing cutting a federal line item of bigger and bigger and ever-bigger government escapes me. Yet I'm sure the WSJ is clear on this contradicted matter, so I'll let it pass.

What shouldn't pass, though, is this other, typically chickenshit notation from the Journal: "We couldn't find an apples-to-apples comparison in the Ryan budget resolution, because FEMA spending was part of a larger category." Well what about your nominee's pledge? As Jonathan Chait wrote yesterday, "Romney’s budget promises require shrinking domestic non-entitlement spending as a share of the economy by about two-thirds." Unquestionably, this week FEMA would be excluded from such shrinking. Next week?

But let's sum up. The authentic fallacy that pseudoconservatives have successfully huckstered for decades is that liberals wish to enlarge government merely for the sake of enlarged government. I'm personally unaware of any liberal or liberal pol or even socialist for that matter who advocates bigness as a stand-alone virtue of government. Government should do what government should do, the doing of which is, of course, a matter of legitimate dispute. But I've never heard a liberal Democrat argue, imply, suggest or even hint that big government is, by definition, good government. The right simply makes this stuff up.

The Romney-Cooked Report: Obama is "clearly ahead"

Rare is the day that the sidewinding King of the Ifs, Charlie Cook, is so declaratory: "Obama is clearly ahead in 21 states ... with a total of 253 electoral votes, 17 short of the 270 needed to win" (emphasis mine).

From there the math, the numbers, the percentages and the probabilities of a Romney victory become inconceivably obscure: "Romney is ahead in 23 states with a total of 191 electoral votes, 79 shy of 270." No doubt the King of the Actual Sidewinders, Eric Ferhnstrom, is pestering Cook this morning for the same adverbially blessed "ahead" that Obama got--the Romney campaign should be awarded at least one honorary electoral vote for superior whining--but, whatever. Perception over reality can't save the Romney camp now, especially after the wind-swept, misty water-colored memories of a FEMA-subdued Sandy.

In short, Romney needs 84 percent of the 94 electoral votes remaining among Cook's "seven jump ball states": Colorado (9), Florida (29), Iowa (6), New Hampshire (4), North Carolina (15), Ohio (18), and Virginia (13). Obama requires only about the same percentage (18) as he does electoral votes (17) from these states. And, as anyone can clearly see, Ohio alone would do it.

Cook's wrap-up point is the now-hemorrhaging conventional wisdom that "the chances of a split popular vote/Electoral College vote are real," with of course Romney taking the former and Obama the latter. Pundits have taken to gloomily forecasting such an outcome as they would a nor'easting hurricane. Me? I think it'd be wonderful. What better way to demonstrate that though we're a majority electorate of imbeciles, we nonetheless found a way to save ourselves. It's just so ... American.

Romney's Take that! campaign

Greg Sargent reports that ÜberTeam Romney has responded to the near universal condemnation (David Brooks is holding out) of its Jeep-to-China Lie by ... what else? ... "expanding the ad campaign."

A Dem source familiar with ad buy info tells me that the Romney campaign has now put a version of the spot on the radio in Toledo, Ohio — the site of a Jeep plant. The buy is roughly $100,000.

That's not really an ad buy. It's more of a confirmation that their own internal polling is showing a devastating, irreversible loss in Ohio.

Not even the ruthless incompetence of the Romney camp would spend $100,000 in the empty hope that the same but Broader Lie will work after the Big Lie did not; it would, however, spend $100,000 just to spit in people's face. Behold--the adolescent personality of the deeply malevolent GOP.

Come again?

Ponder this one for a while and see if your head doesn't explode.

Headline: "NPR Poll Finds Presidential Race Too Close To Call"

Lede:

The latest and last NPR Battleground Poll for 2012 shows former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney holding the narrowest of leads in the national sample, but trailing President Obama in the dozen states that will decide the election.

Italics--and exasperation--mine.

"A churlish prick"

That's singer-songwriter Stephen Stills' designation for Mitt Romney in a Rolling Stone piece that so coherently captures Romney's essence of prickdom it leaves you wondering why even our magnificently inept punditocracy can't figure it out.

Another Stills quote:

I never in my lifetime thought I would see a creepier politician than Richard Nixon, but ...

If Hell itself were to unleash its satanic fury and somehow elect Mitt Romney? We'd see entire armies of Nixons, demagoguing and confidently Big Lying their way to higher office, just like their mentors, Tricky Dick and Moderate Mitt ... and Joseph Goebbels.

Christie's grief is immense

In a less than subtle fraternization with the wicked enemy networks of NBC and MSNBC, NJ Gov. Chris Chistie this morning declared: "The federal government’s response has been great.... [T]he president has been outstanding in this. The folks at FEMA ... have been excellent." And, "the president has been all over this and deserves great credit."

According to credible sources available only to me, Christie was also prepared to announce for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, but decided to wait until next Wednesday.

In related news, Mitt Romney was discovered this morning secreted in a dark closet--fetal posture, soft whimpering, thumb-sucking, cries of Why, why, why, Chris? ... the whole sorry, pathetic shebang. 

David Brooks: The Final Insult

I hereby affix my seal of hopelessness on David Brooks.

Here's a man who habitually gives witness to the glories of empirical, Burkean conservatism, yet this morning he foresees a tax-raising, reelection-unconcerned President Romney who'd be willing to defy his party's accelerating extremism and govern like an Eisenhower.

Everything, everything Mitt Romney has done over the last six years screams radical compliance. But Brooks says that ain't so. It wouldn't happen. The gutless, demagoguing chickenhawk of tireless tea party ass-kissing would, upon taking the presidential oath of office, suddenly recognize his profound responsibilities to a nation in need of bipartisan reforms--as opposed to the exigencies of his own reelection--and thus abruptly downshift ideologically.

Furthermore Brooks, the Times' greatest champion of greater civility and dignity in politics, brushes aside President Obama's extraordinary consistency in both and instead declares, seemingly from whole cloth, that "By running such a negative presidential campaign, Obama has won no mandate for a Grand Bargain." The gentle, moderate, subdued Mitt Romney will have.     

I don't know which was a more out-of-body experience: my reading David Brooks' column or his writing it. But either way, he has now poisoned his professed Burkean roots at least once too often. He's not at all a political thinker of a tender philosophical bent. He's just a hack.

Whistling through the torrent

In his headline, Wonkblog's Brad Plumer answers a curiously little-asked question as Mother Nature swamps the East Coast: "Yes, Hurricane Sandy is a good reason to worry about climate change."

But heaven forfend we should worry about it at the federal level, let alone on a global plane. Let's first send such worries--if indeed there's even cause for worry--back to the states. Yes, that’s the right direction. And if we can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.

Meanwhile,

In the mid-Atlantic region, the coastal seas have risen about eight inches since 1900....

What’s more, sea-level rise is expected to accelerate in the decades ahead--an additional two to seven feet by 2100.... [I]t is "very likely" that extreme coastal flooding during storms will become far more common in the future as a result. And that’s a big problem for cities such as New York.

Yeah, so what? The moral thing to do, in my view, is for us to continue to rack up higher and higher seas and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before the rising tides are stemmed. It makes perfect sense.

The press finally gets Romney's mendacity?

TPM reports a veritable journalistic uprising in the form of "news articles, tweets, and other media" as members of the Fourth Estate, "usually reluctant to criticize campaigns directly, have taken Romney to task for running a misleading TV ad creating the false impression that Jeep will ship jobs to China."

This--to jump on merely one of Romney's fabrication--strikes me as distressingly peculiar. Why single out Romney's Jeep ad? Can you think of any ad, on any subject, from job creation to budget balancing to women's rights, in which Mitt Romney has troubled himself with the truth or consistency? Or on the stump. Friday, I think it was, I sat and listened to Romney lie at a rally--and I mean outright, brazenly lie--for a solid 15 minutes: Obama had doubled the deficit, he said, and slashed Medicare, he continued, and so it went, one utterly despicable falsehood after another. All it lacked was a promise to rescind the Treaty of Versailles.

I have never witnessed, never read of, never studied such a dishonorable American presidential campaign as Mitt Romney's. It is vulgar, it is barbaric, and yes, in its tactics, it is Hitlerian. I know there's a kind of journalistic law that condemns all such comparisons as recklessly hyperbolic. Frankly, I don't care. Because in Romney's case, it's the truth--and journalists should have been reporting the broad obscenity of it in "news articles, tweets, and other media" all along.

Billy Graham's odd little ad

Dave Weigel points to a full-page, one-paragraph ad by Billy Graham in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. It reads, in part:

I urge you to vote for those who protect the sanctity of life and support the biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman.

I have no problem with the mildly pixilated who seriously believe that anonymous hardcore God-hearing paternalists were divinely and uniquely tutored thousands of years ago on how modern Americans should arrange indirectly for U.S. Supreme Court nominations or what qualifies as a blessed union. But what puzzles the eternal bejesus out of me is how any "good Christian" who genuinely believes in "protect[ing] the sanctity of life" could vote for the blood-curdling, neoconservatively Crusading, manifestly bellicose Mitt Romney.

Will the Weekly Standard ever tire of misleading its readers?

This is vintage Weekly Standard.

You know that Politico/George Washington University Battleground Tracking Poll that was just released? The one I cited earlier today? The one, as Politico reported, that finds "President Barack Obama has recaptured a narrow national lead over Mitt Romney"?

Well here's how Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard originally reported it: "The bipartisan Battleground Poll, in its 'vote election model,' is projecting that Mitt Romney will defeat President Obama 52 percent to 47 percent."

Not a word ... not ... a ... word ... about Obama's actual lead in the poll.

Only later did Barnes provide this "update": "Politico reports on the poll's top-line: Obama 49, Romney 48 percent. But it is the noteworthy last paragraph from [the Republican pollster's internal] memo that we're referring to."

The Weekly Standard. Integrity. Always, integrity.

National Review: still in need of sedation

I've yet to discern if this sort of garbage--this particular heap, courtesy National Review--is an authentic conviction among the right-wing commentariat or is designed only to agitate the primitive base:

Obama is trying to shape a new kind of electorate ["African Americans, Hispanics, women, and young people"], creating a long-term Democratic majority that would allow him and his successors to stop catering to the center and finally govern decisively from the left....

Obama and his advisors never abandoned their quest to shape a permanent leftist majority.

You know, because Obama's entire political history suggests one of uncompromising radicalism, right?

NR's editorial refuses to even acknowledge reality, let alone engage it. Virtually all of Obama's short-term Democratic-majority victories were grounded in pragmatic, centrist politics--ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, a tax-cut-mitigated stimulus package, even the auto bailout came at the president's insistence that "the car business" wasn't for him.

Ah, but that's the past, some say. What might the future hold? NR doesn't say, not in the least; it simply peppers its piece with vague allusions to leftist politics, a "leftist majority" and "leftist Obamaism"--Bolshevik bogeymen all.  

For the right, the Stalinist Obama is always lurking just around the next corner. True, he's governed for four years as a pragmatic centrist, meaning an FDR-style conservative progressive. But like the NRA's warning that Obama's resistance to federal gun control only means a fierce commitment to much more of it, the right's commentariat wants us--or merely the primitive, paranoid base--to know that years and years of Obama's moderation are but vivid signposts to a scalding, far-leftist hell.