P.M. Carpenter

Mitt Romney's latest "I'm running for office, for Pete's sake" gaffe

Earlier today I didn't have time to comment on the sheer creepiness of Mitt Romney's remark to Mark Leibovich about his infamous "47 percent" blunder of 2012, but creepy it was--and characteristically Mitt. I now have a moment.

Romney laments: "My mistake was that I was speaking in a way that reflected back to the man [in the elite gathering]. If I had been able to see the camera, I would have remembered that I was talking to the whole world, not just the man."

In other words, Romney regrets either a) not having lied to a member of his political base, or b) that he was lying to a member of his political base--but either way, his only profound regret is that the lie/failed lie was caught on camera. In this context, one is reminded of Mitt's 2012 debate performance in which he stated his noble objection to a landscape contractor having employed undocumented workers: "I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake, I can’t have illegals."

Another way of putting Mitt's creepiness is that he's frighteningly reminiscent of Hillary: the ultimate pragmatist without a discernible dollop of principles. Watching these two pure opportunists slug it out in the general campaign should, for the civically conscientious, just about polish off any vestigial faith they may have in representative democracy. If Mitt & Hillary are the best the world's lone superpower has to offer, then we're in trouble. But you already knew that.

 

Checking in on 538 and Vox

From USA Today's the big lead:

Inside ESPN, there has been a lot of talk about the struggles of Nate Silver’s 538 website. It hasn’t even been online for a year yet, but from lack of revenue to lack of traffic to lack of advertising, it is already being billed as a "disaster" by some at the network. [An ESPN spokesman said Friday about 538: "Traffic is ahead of where it was with the New York Times."]

I wonder how Ezra's Vox is doing? There is a sizable Sprint communications ad on the main page, but at random I clicked on one of its stories--"Confessions of a former internet troll"--and saw no advertising at all. I clicked on another story; it had a rather small AT&T banner ad at the top. Ezra's current piece--"What Republicans want to do if they win the Senate"--also had a small banner ad, and a larger sidebar advertisement for Absolut vodka.

How does all that stack up dollar-wise? I have no idea. But $10 million (the amount Ezra sought, and was refused by, the Washington Post) is one helluva hefty stake to offset.

 

Romney grants another thumbs-up interview

Mark Leibovich reviews the "confluence of political realities [that] has created a genuine opening for a Romney third act."

As Obama struggles through a difficult final term, there is a lack of a clear Republican heir apparent. Presumptive early front-runners, like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, have shown themselves to be flawed or reluctant or both. A splintering of possible movement candidates (Rand Paul, Ted Cruz) could beget a need for a default consensus choice.

And in Leibovich's interview of Romney, we read a confluence of green lights from the virtual candidate himself. "We’ve got a lot of people looking at the race. We’ll see what happens," he said. He also made sure to belittle Hillary Clinton as an "enabler" of the sitting, unpopular president's foreign policy. And then there was this: "I was talking to one of my political advisers, and I said: 'If I had to do this again, I’d insist that you literally had a camera on me at all times,'" to remind the candidate of lurking, concealed cell phones. 

As Leibovich remarks, "It was ... impossible to ignore the phrase 'If I had to do this again.'"

Of course Romney doesn't have to do this again, but he'll make it sound as though he does: self-sacrificial Mitt, rescuing us, by demand, from an Obama third term, a corrupt New Jersey governor, an isolationist wingnut and a Texas nihilist.

God this is going to be fun.

 

Bill O'Reilly, still killing us with horseshit

Richard Cohen lights into Bill O'Reilly's latest historical obscenity, Killing Patton--the fourth and one hopes last in his exciting, paranoid quadrilogy, which also includes Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, and Killing Jesus--for "its chaotic structure, its considerable padding and its repellent admiration of a war-loving martinet who fought the Nazis and really never understood why."

Cohen is even more offended by O'Reilly's deliberate neglect of Patton's documented anti-Semitism. In his postwar diary, for instance, the general described liberated Jews as nonhuman and "lower than animals." But such is the common vice of the hagiographer: suppression of any idol-reducing material.

Should we expect any less from "No Spin" O'Reilly? No way. Nor should we be surprised at this cash-mongering martinet's penchant for bamboozling the conspiracy rubes with yet more paranoid bugaboos--this time, about Patton's death. The general died as the result of an auto accident--pure and simple. From what I could gather from his "This Week" interview with George Stephanopoulos (and by the way, what was that all about?), O'Reilly hustles the fantasy of a Stalin hit.

And it can all be yours for a mere $18, via Amazon. I dare you.

 

U.S. intelligence covers its rear

The U.S. intelligence community is feeling a bit besieged, what with the president having suggested on "60 Minutes" that it performed less than a crackerjack job in warning the administration about ISIS' calamitous potential. Thus one intelligence official has been dispatched--anonymously--by professional ass-coverers to inform the NYT that "Some of us were pushing the reporting, but the White House just didn’t pay attention to it. They were preoccupied with other crises. This just wasn’t a big priority."

That sounds reasonable. Doubtless, warnings there were, which the NYT expansively surveys. Nonetheless, U.S. intelligence is still left with three inconvenient realities, the first and most inconvenient of which is that James Clapper himself admitted earlier this month to WaPo's David Ignatius that he "underestimated ISIL and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army.... I didn’t see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming." As director of national intelligence, Clapper sees whatever bubbles up from all the intel agencies, so one may assume that his underestimation of ISIS was but an underestimation based on others'.

The second problem with the intelligence community's revisionism is one of proportion, or volume; which is to ask, How forceful was it in its warnings? The director of the National Security Agency recently answered, saying that "It"--ISIS's shift from insurgency to conquest--is "an area we talked about, but in hindsight, I wish we had been a little ... stronger about."

Finally (and this loops back to Clapper's additional observation above) the intelligence community's fundamental miscall perhaps came less in underestimating ISIS than in overestimating the Iraqi Army--fundamental, because the latter error, likely shared with the Iraqi Army, contributed to ISIS' Iraq success. As a "senior [U.S.] Army general" told the NYT, "We were surprised by their regional ambitions, the speed of their advance into Mosul and the collapse of the Iraqi security forces." The key word: surprised, as late as June of this year, when the Mosul onslaught occurred.

None if this excuses the administration's radical turnabout in committing the U.S. to a sustained, military campaign in the world's hottest sectarian and civil wars. But all of this does suggest that the administration's turnabout came after the intelligence community woke up.

 

Ron Johnson on "Hardball"--truly shocking ignorance

Appearing on "Hardball," GOP Senator Ron Johnson just delivered a remarkably muddle-headed position on American ground troops in Iraq and Syria.

Would he support American combat troops in the region? Yes, he certainly would, even though he insisted that the "conundrum" of ISIS can be resolved only by regional Muslims rejecting fanatical Islam. He further insisted that ISIS wants us to engage militarily, on the ground, because they know, they just know, he said, that we don't have the staying power. In a year or two we would pack up and go home, he added, parroting Charles Krauthammer. And then they could gloat.

Johnson didn't seem to grasp that ISIS wants us on the ground because nothing would further their fanatical cause more than intimate American involvement--yet again--in the region's sectarian politics. We'd be fighting in defense of Shiite Iraq and alongside Shiite Iran in effective support of Syria's Shiite regime.

This is not hard. But to Sen. Johnson, it is apparently incomprehensible. In one breath he insists that Arab Muslims and only Arab Muslims can solve the problem of ISIS, and then recommends American interference with the next. It utterly escapes his senatorial mind that ISIS desperately wants his recommendation to materialize--because, in their minds, and in the minds of growing numbers of regional Muslims, we would be Allah-sent and primed for destruction.

It is shocking that any member of the United States Senate (aside from James Inhofe, of course) could be so staggeringly clueless. Shocking, and profoundly depressing.

 

Maher, Zinni, salutes and silliness

In debating President Obama's "latte salute" that had the political right in emotional knots last week, Bill Maher has this exchange with Gen. Anthony Zinni: 

"Let me just say, if this offends you that much, you should marry your teddy bear," [said Maher to the general population].

"It offends me," Zinni responded.

"You know that Bush did it with a dog, right?" Maher countered.

"That offends me, too," Zinni said.

"Is this more important than like anything else in the world?" Maher asked.

"It is a gesture of respect," Zinni shot back.

What's offensive is that crap like this is seriously discussed in the media, and especially by the right. One would think that after forcing pointless government shutdowns, threatening to derail the global economy in exorbitant hissy fits and obstructing every intelligent proposal to reinvigorate the economy, the American right would abstain--at least for a while--from sounding like the taunting, adolescent schoolyarders they are.

(By the way, after Bill Maher pointed out--correctly--that President Eisenhower never saluted his Marines when de-helicoptering, so to speak, Gen. Zinni remarked that there were no presidential helicopters then. Wrong. Eisenhower used one to travel to Camp David.)

 

Rick Santorum prepares for another fall

Politico features the "return" of the man who never really went away, Rick Santorum:

The iconoclast social conservative is already taking the temperature of potential donors. His big money benefactor, Foster Friess, still adores him. He’s headed to Iowa in October to meet with key conservative activists. And he is growing his grass-roots network beyond early primary states.

Friday I noted the GOP's superabundance of 2016 losers. (To save you a click, they include, other than Santorum, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, Mike Rogers, John Bolton, Mike Huckabee, Marsha Blackburn, Michele Bachmann, Rob Portman, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Mike Pence, Peter King, Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman, John Kasich, Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson).

And Saturday I concluded that since some of the smarter ones, such as Sen. Cruz, know beyond any doubt that their reactionary platforms are sure losers, they must be sincere in promoting them. Nothing other than a quixotic evangelism would explain why any pol would labor for years hawking an electorally condemned philosophy.

His candidacy may be doomed, but his cause is righteous, and God will love him for it--that sort of thing.

I think we can safely add Rick to Ted's curious category of fruitless valor. In fact, this morning the NY Times editorial board already did--indirectly, anyway:       

For years [Democrats] were cowed by the religious right into changing the subject when abortion or birth control or same-sex marriage came up. But now, increasingly assured that public opinion supports their positions, Democrats have become more aggressive in challenging Republicans about their beliefs....

It is ... a reflection of the growing obsolescence of traditional Republican wedge issues in state after state.

Santorum knows that; he can read, he has pollsters, and every now and then he talks to advisers in touch with the 21st century. And yet he's at it again. The Republican nomination may mean nothing to 2016's virtually predetermined outcome, but it means everything to the ideologically possessed and self-righteously committed. It's kinda sad.

 

Our confidence is high--that we'll get sucked in

A CNN/ORC poll just released finds that while only 38 percent of Americans favor sending U.S. ground troops into Iraq or Syria, an astounding 75 percent believe it is "somewhat" or "very likely" that the U.S. will "eventually" do just that.

I'm one of them. The war hawks have become relentless; their fearmongering now rivals that of their monitory screeching about Saddam Hussein; our terrestrial allies are either absent or fleeing; our Syrian allies have yet to be deployed--indeed, that development is about a year away; airstrikes can only do so much; and since our mission is a multiyear commitment, the odds of a downed U.S. pilot or captured forward observer crouching in Middle East sand--on video tape, in every American living room--are astronomically high.

Then what?

 

But they were just chatting

From the You Can't Make This Stuff Up department, the NY Times reports on Ohio's Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Ed FitzGerald, whose "troubles began in midsummer with the revelation that" ...

the police had found him two years earlier parked in a car at 4:30 a.m. with a woman who was not his wife. He denied anything inappropriate.

So, long story short, Ed's money dried up and thus he can't run ads against Gov. John Kasich, who, with underwater approval ratings, was a prime target for Dems.

 

Nate Silver directs "The Perfect Ambivalence"

Silver taketh and giveth and then taketh away again only to partially give back in his latest appraisal of the Senate seesaw. According to his prevailing forecast, Republicans harbor high probabilities of taking the current Democratic seats of Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia, which gives them their needed six for majority control.

But--and who would have predicted this six months ago?--Republican Pat Roberts' Kansas seat is a tossup. So they need some insurance. And over the weekend, they got it. Writes Silver:

The Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll always makes news and with good reason: The pollster that conducts it, Selzer & Company, is among the best in the country, according to FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings. On Saturday evening, the poll had an especially interesting result in Iowa’s Senate race. It put the Republican candidate Joni Ernst six points ahead of the Democrat, Representative Bruce Braley.

If Selzer's poll reflects an Iowan reality to come, then there's the GOP's backup. In addition, "Polls have also moved toward Republicans in Colorado," observes Silver.

Nonetheless he adds that it's "not quite" time for Democrats to "panic," since there's "too much ... uncertainty in the outlook." We're speaking, after all, about fallible polls, and Election Day is still weeks ahead.

On the other hand you may wish to avoid the last-minute rush to alarm, and panic now.

 

ISIS and Iraq: just another U.S. intelligence failure

If President Obama's "60 Minutes" chat with Steve Kroft was meant to inspire confidence in the path ahead as envisioned by our superspook masters of universal knowingness, it failed. In fact, it only drove home the chilling ineptitude of the U.S. intelligence community--that bedlam of "slam dunks" and Oops, we never noticed that the scary, all-powerful Soviet Bear was imploding.

"Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that ... they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria," conceded the president, while having to admit as well that the "community" overestimated the ability of our multibillion-dollar desertion force--known generously as the Iraqi Army--to fight ISIS.

It was this sprawling community's failure to predict and prevent 9/11 that created Clapper's job--an overall directorship of national intelligence--which in the future would guard against a lack of intelligence clarity, crossed communications, miscommunications, gross underestimations and even grosser overestimations. Last night was the product: a humiliated POTUS confessing to the world, There they go again.

Which of the intelligence community's most recent errors was more egregious--the underestimation of ISIS or the overestimation of the, ahem, Iraqi Army? This morning's NYT story on the latter's afflictions--which range from abject poltroonery to a dismaying indifference ("Most of those interviewed said they were joining primarily because they badly needed the pay, not out of any sense of loyalty or desire to fight")--would seem to answer that question. Had we known, say, a year ago that our principal ally was little more than a martial house of canards, perhaps we could have done more to professionalize it ... before ISIS laid waste to a such a good chunk of the country.

 

Obama on "60 Minutes"? No, Boehner on "This Week."

Splashed on the NY Times' front page is the news that President Obama, speaking on "60 Minutes" tonight, concedes error in the administration's past assessment of ISIS. But the more unsettling news, from several hours ago, comes several paragraphs down in the NYT story:

"These are barbarians," Mr. Boehner told George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program "This Week." "They intend to kill us. And if we don’t destroy them first, we’re going to pay the price."

Mr. Stephanopoulos asked, "If no one else will step up, would you recommend putting American boots on the ground?"

"We have no choice," said Mr. Boehner.

They--and you know who they are--will get us there yet. They'll yet get us into another ground war in the Middle East. With each passing day, another Republican hawk imperturbably speaks of the necessity of American combat forces in Syria and Iraq, for we, it seems, are the world's only effective policemen; and not a day has gone by this month that I haven't heard some retired Army colonel or Air Force general speak similarly, on CNN, of America's inexorable mission.

The monstrous Islamic State is a regional menace, but it is not a threat to U.S. security interests. As such our regional "allies"--each of them up to their taqiyah caps in American military hardware--have a security interest in putting their boots on Syrian or Iraqi ground.

Yes, we do have a choice, Mr. Boehner. But do proceed: Hype the situation some more, frighten the children, spook the midterm ranks of the rednecks over the "barbarians" coming "to kill us," ratchet up the fever and take us into some post-election hysteria about the Democratic commander in chief's "weakness," and then, just let politics and palsied old generals on cable news take care of the rest. You'll have your war.

 

The Upshot, Silver & Wang: today, on the same page

Whether from a tweaked convergence of methodology or a universally recognized dispersal of Democratic incompetence, the midterm's leading handicappers have, over the weekend, come to eerily similar forecasts.

On Friday, the NYT's Upshot catapulted the odds of a GOP Senate from 50 percent to 61 percent; last night, they advanced them to 64 percent (due chiefly to polling shifts in Iowa, Colorado and Alaska). FiveThirtyEight now gives Republicans a 60 percent chance of taking the majority. (If you're straining to see an upside, Silver estimates a mere 17 percent chance of a 52-seat Republican majority.) At Princeton Election Consortium, Sam Wang says "current conditions" are a 61 percent chance of a GOP majority.

Wang's Election Day forecast, however, remains contrarian. He still gives the Dems a 70 percent chance of retaining control, since, in his psephological opinion, the Upshot and 538 continue to place too much importance on political science's "fundamentals," such as the Democrats' midterm disadvantage of a sitting president of their own party. Recent history, says Wang, has diminished that disadvantage.

My instincts--admittedly a poor forecaster when stacked up against Wang's "Meta-Margins" and "MATLAB" computer codes--tell me that the anti-Wang handicappers are correct. In general this seems a particularly lousy year for the Dems, what with the lopsided number of Democratic seats playing defense, a Democratic president's poor approval ratings, the right's traditionally higher electoral engagement, the recent immigration kerfuffle, and now a Middle East war.

 

Ted Cruz and the politics of futility

I'm beginning to think the unthinkable--that Ted Cruz is sincere.

Nothing else explains his dogged determination to pander to narrow, politically abnegating slices of the American electorate in his larger pursuit of higher national office. In so mawkishly appealing to the hardest-right audiences he alienates virtually all others. This strategic path to the White House is damned, doomed, already a done deal. Given Cruz's intelligence, he is surely aware of his fate--and yet he goes on, pandering and alienating, pushing and receding, appealing and deliberately disaffecting. Perhaps, then, he actually believes in his mission, and is willing to take the fall?

Yesterday he was back at it, appearing at the Values Voter conference in Washington. Politico reports that even more than the titanically priggish Rick Santorum, "it was Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas who captivated the crowd of social conservatives." He brayed about America's "Judeo-Christian values" and snorted that he and his pious ilk "stand for life. We stand for marriage. We stand for Israel. We bring back jobs and opportunity and unleash small businesses to make it easier for people to achieve the American dream. We abolish the IRS. We repeal Common Core."

They are also utterly clueless, out of touch, and living in another century. Not even Mitt Romney in his wildest self-degradations would appeal not to the 20th-, but to the 19th-century American mind, which dwells almost exclusively in the crimson backwaters of a vanishing electorate. Indeed, not even Barry Goldwater's 1964 politics were as reactionary as Cruz's. For that, one would have to travel back to the 1930s.

In his brilliant 1983 work, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin & the Great Depression, historian Alan Brinkley traced the incoherent, anachronistic yearnings of the title characters. To an unwitting base they hustled the fallacy of a 20th-century return to "simpler," decentralized, 19th-century times. By the 1930s those times had, of course, been lost to industrial America and the necessity of a larger, centralized government; the nation had moved on. In short, Long & Co.'s political potential was austerely delimited from the get-go.

As is Ted Cruz's, but even more so. Because he has to know that, could he then be sincere? I'm beginning to wonder.