“Conspiracy Addled Loons”: Birtherism Is Back Now In Full Force
It seems birtherism is now back in full force. This can only mean there is an election coming up, and that the Republicans really, really need to court their worst and foulest supporters. If they can’t impress them with the sack of nothingness that is Mitt Romney, then they’ll at least point out that that other guy is, you know, suspicious.
First we had Donald Trump and his newfound dedication to birtherism, apparently as a direct response to people paying attention to him again. Among the people paying most attention: Mitt Romney, who for some reason is embracing fellow crapsack Trump instead of, say, avoiding him like a communicable disease. There’s still no obvious explanation for this, but apparently Romney really needs Trump voters (gawd help us, I don’t even want to know who those might be. Probably people who watch Jersey Shore, but think it isn’t vapid enough).
This has led to an interesting dance in which Team Mitt simultaneously cuddles up to the now-notorious birther and angrily denounces anyone who points that rather goddamn obvious fact out. Surrogate John Sununu was very, very surly with CNN for having Donald Trump on the teevee the same day as Trump’s event with Romney:
“Why is CNN so fixated on this?” Sununu, the former New Hampshire Governor, asked CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. “It’s CNN that wants to bring this up. I don’t want to bring it up. Mitt Romney has made it clear that he believes President Obama was born in the U.S. You had Donald Trump on last night, and now you are asking the question this morning. It’s CNN’s fixation.”
Why is the media fixated on Trump being an embarrassing, conspiracy-addled loon who yells his conspiracy theories at any member of the media who will listen? Gosh, I don’t know, Mr. Sununu, but it seems a bit like Mitt Romney holding an event with the Florida face-eating cannibal, but then getting mad if anyone mentions the face-eating part.
Donald Trump’s sole contribution to the discourse of late is public birtherism. That’s it. That’s his schtick. A far betterquestion would be why CNN feels any need whatsoever to talk to John Sununu about it. Who the hell cares what John Sununu thinks?
But even as Trump’s newest push into birtherism gets rave reviews from other conservative crackpots, Trump’s far from the only one involved here. Birtherism is resurgent in the entire Republican Party now. While Mitt Romney plays the hug-the-birther game, now Michigan Senate candidate and former congressperson Pete Hoekstra thinks birtherism needs to be elevated to the level of government function:
Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), who is running for Senate to take on Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, told a tea party town hall last month that the federal government should establish an official committee to review presidential candidates’ birth certificates. […]“Sure. I mean, I think — you know, I think, throw something at me if you want, I think with this president, the book is closed, all right?” Hoekstra tells the man. “It’s kind of like, I hate to say it, but I think the debate’s over — we lost that debate, and we lost that debate in 2008, when our presidential nominee said, ‘I ain’t talking about it.’ OK, I’m sorry.”
Note that Hoekstra doesn’t think the debate’s over because the evidence came in, thus rendering the entire debate pointless and stupid. He just thinks the debate’s over because John McCain didn’t talk about it enough. So now the small government (pfft) conservative wants a new government committee to review what already gets reviewed, just to make super-duper-extra-sure no secret Kenyan is trying to pull a fast one with the secret help of every damn functionary in the Hawaii state government. Goodie.
So is Mitt talking about this stuff? Of course he is. He’s talking about it in that lovely, not-really-talking-about-it way that has characterized his entire relationship with Donald Trump. Why, Mitt Romney just released his birth certificate, in an apparent attempt to prove absolutely nothing to absolutely nobody.
Yes, Republican Mitt Romney appears eligible to be president, according to a copy of Romney’s birth certificate released to Reuters by his campaign. Willard Mitt Romney, the certificate says, was born in Detroit on March 12, 1947.His mother, Lenore, was born in Utah and his father, former Michigan governor and one-time Republican presidential candidate George Romney, was born in Mexico.
Yes, Mitt Romney’s dad was born in Mexico. Want to see the birth certificate? That’s it up there at the top of the post.
Oh, Lord. Now I ask you, does that really prove anything? First off, using my special sleuthing powers I have discovered that it says “VOID” all down both sides of the page! And it was only printed in January of this year! And did they really have that typeface back in 1947? And look at the way the sheet is cut off, on the left, and how the whole page is slanted towards the left, as if it were trying to tell us something? It is obviously not a legitimate certificate that proves a darn thing, leading to the obvious question: Was Mitt Romney really born at all? Let’s ask Donald Trump’s rear end to weigh in on this.
That’s a trick question, of course. The answer is that Mitt Romney is really, really white (Pay no attention to the Mexican heritage, that was just something to do with Mitt’s ancestors fleeing the United States to practice—you know what? Never mind. Stuff happened, let’s just leave it at that.) and that people who look sufficiently white are automatically “true” Americans because conservatism really is just that dull and shallow.
By: Hunter, Daily Kos, May 30, 2012
Romney-Trump In 2012: The “I’ve Got Mine And The Hell With You” Financiers
What could Romney’s handlers be thinking when they hyped his connection with Donald Trump — fundraising with Trump, offering supporters the possibility of a meal with Trump, relishing Trump’s attention and endorsement?
Trump signifies everything Romney presumably doesn’t want people to associate with himself — conspicuous wealth, arrogance, hubris, and a distinct preference for money over all other human values.
Trump, like Romney, represents almost everything that’s wrong with the American economy today — an unprecedented amount of wealth and power at the very top, widespread insecurity and declining real wages for everyone else, and a form of casino capitalism that places huge bets with other peoples’ money and depends on everyone else to bail it out when the bets turn sour.
But wait a minute. Perhaps Romney’s handlers are smarter than they seem. Maybe Mitt has decided to let it all hang out. Rather than try to hide what’s obvious to everyone, the new strategy is to make Romney’s liabilities into assets by flaunting them. Be even bigger and bolder. Money rules!
In fact, they’re mulling an even bigger and bolder move. They recall how Bill Clinton’s choice of Al Gore as running mate in 1992 — someone very much like Clinton — accentuated Clinton’s youthful energy, the new generation he represented, and the new start Clinton wanted to give America.
So they figure Mitt’s choice of Trump as running mate will allow Mitt to celebrate his boundless capacity to make money, the “I’ve got mine and the hell with you” financiers and CEOs he represents, and the social Darwinism that he and the regressive right are convinced will be good for America.
The new bumper-sticker: ROMNEY-TRUMP IN 2012. YOU’RE FIRED!
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, May 29, 2012
“Job Destroyers, Inc”: More Bad Company For Mitt
It’s apparently not enough for Mitt Romney that he’s holding a Vegas fundraising event tonight featuring Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump, just as the latter political werewolf is reviving his birtherist act.
Next up, in California, Romney’s doing a high-dollar event with everyone’s favorite failed political robot and job destroyer: yes, Meg Whitman! In case you (like me) have tried very hard not to think about eMeg since the last of her mind-numbing, soul-deadening 2010 gubernatorial campaign ads faded from the air, she’s been back in the news as the CEO of HP, doing what she does best: laying off employees. Here’s an assessment of her brief but destructive tenure at HP by SiliconBeat’s Chris O’Brien:
Listening to the Hewlett Packard earnings call was an exercise in the surreal today. CEO Meg Whitman started the call with a cheerful anecdote about some really neat-o gizmo she saw at HP. Just the sorta whiz bang stuff that’s gonna get HP back on its feet in no time!
She’s never been more optimistic about HP’s future! Gonna invest more in that innovation stuff!
Then she proceeded with all sorts of other happy talk about the business stabilizing and yada, yada, yada. And oh, by the way, to realign costs with the business we’re going to throw 27,000 people out the window.
[T]his has to be a crushing blow to an employee base already intensely demoralized by non-stop job cuts over the past decade. HP is not so much a company as it is a patchwork of acquired pieces of technology and companies, a kind of Frankstein monster of the high-tech industry.
Meg Whitman is to the technology industry what Mitt Romney is to private equity: an American Beauty Rose of “best management practices” that add up to a lot of misery and dysfunction. Romney could do a lot for the clarity of his economic message by just putting Meg on the ticket with him. Aside from all the many things they have in common, together they could pretty much self-fund the whole campaign if they wished. (Oh, yeah, sorry, forgot that Whitman can’t be on a national ticket because she is not, last time I checked, anti-choice!).
Newt, Trump, Whitman, on back-to-back days, just as Romney is officially nailing down the GOP presidential nomination. It has to be a nightmare for Romney’s staff. Don’t be surprised if they throw a few random punches to distract attention from the company their candidate is keeping.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 29, 2012
“Can’t Touch This”: It’s Time To Stop Letting Mitt Romney Off Easy
Mitt Romney wants the presidential election to be all about Barack Obama. If the press doesn’t start asking Romney some difficult questions about the core arguments upon which his entire presidential candidacy is based, he may very well get his way.
Case in point: Check out Mike Allen’s preview this morning of the Romney campaign’s next attack on the President’s economic record…
A senior aide tells us Mitt Romney plans to begin hitting specific stimulus projects as he travels, arguing that President Obama has actually subtracted jobs:
“Were these investments the best return on tax dollars, or given for ideological reasons, to donors, for political reasons? He spent $800 billion of everybody’s money. How’d it work out? It was the mother of all earmarks, not a jobs plan. By wasting all of this money, you had the worst of all worlds: It destroyed confidence in the economy, and makes people less likely to borrow money. Dodd-Frank has been a disaster for the economy. Where are the steady hands? Who’s in charge of energy? Where’s the strong, confident voice on the economy?”
So Romney will now go back to claiming Obama subtracted jobs. But there’s a new twist: Romney will claim that the effect of the stimulus has been to destroy jobs. As it has in the past, the Romney camp will justify this by pointing to a bogus metric — the net jobs lost on Obama’ watch. That includes the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost before the stimulus went into effect. Really: The Romney camp’s claim is that we can calculate that the stimulus destroyed jobs overall with a metric that factors in all the jobs destroyed before the stimulus took effect. That’s not an exaggeration. It really is the Romney campaign’s position. It’s time to ask Romney himself to justify it.
The Romney camp will also begin claiming that Obama has “never created a job.” Will anyone ask Romney about the two dozen straight months of private sector job creation we’ve seen?
And if Romney is now going to start hitting individual stimulus projects, it’s also time to ask him what he would have done if he had been president in January of 2009. He has previously said positive things about stimulus spending. Are those no longer operative? Would Romney really not have proposed any government spending to stimulate the economy when it was in free fall? What would he have done instead? This question is absolutely central. How about asking it?
Then there’s the claim that “Dodd-Frank has been a disaster for the economy.” Romney has pledged to roll back financial reform completely, but he hasn’t said with any meaningful specificity what he woud replace it with, beyond claiming (after the J.P. Morgan debacle forced him to do so) that he supports “common sense regulations.” How about asking Romney what, if anything, he would do instead to guard against future Wall Street recklessness after rolling back Obama’s regulatory response to the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression?
Many of the claims that form the foundation of Romney’s entire case for the presidency are going without any meaningful national press scrutiny to speak of. Why?
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, May 29, 2012
“Much Like Sarah Palin”: Why Mitt Romney Only Does Fox News Interviews
The only Sunday morning talk show Mitt Romney has appeared on this election season is Fox News Sunday, and the other networks are annoyed that the Republican presidential candidate is ignoring their invitations. “I know he does Fox,” Bob Schieffer said to senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie on CBS’s Face the Nation this weekend, “but we’d love to have him some time, as would Meet the Press and the ABC folk, I would guess.” Gillespie replied: “We’re going to take our message to the American people. You saw him talking to schoolchildren last week.” And it’s not just the Sunday shows Romney is avoiding. Aside from two sit-downs alongside his wife, Ann — on CBS and ABC — and appearances on CNBC and CNN, Romney has only talked with Fox News since securing the GOP nod nearly two months ago. Why is Romney sticking with the “fair and balanced” network? Here, five theories:
1. He only wants softball questions
Romney is following the lead of other conservative Republicans, says Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice, “using Fox News as a way to avoid having to answer those pesky, non–public relations, non-softball questions and follow-up questions that he’d get on CBS, NBC, ABC.” Much like Sarah Palin, he has “had a hard time in other interviews beyond Fox,” says Ron Chusid at Liberal Values. Romney doesn’t like to get into specifics on his secret plan for the economy or why his Bain Capital record is an asset, and heaven forbid “clips of his past statements were brought up.”
2. Romney learned his lesson from the primaries
Sticking with Fox is a deliberate strategy by Team Romney “to limit national media exposure this time around,” says Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post. Romney did the Sunday shows and magazine profiles in 2008, and his GOP rivals “made the weekend rounds” this year, and how well did any of that work out? After the contentious primary, Romney has “benefited from learning the importance of hammering home a singular message on safe turf,” says Justin Sink at The Hill.
3. He’s still shoring up his right flank
Team Romney is working hard to strengthen its bridges to the Right, and Fox News is just part of that strategy, says Calderone at The Huffington Post. Along with his two appearances on Fox News Sunday, the former Massachusetts governor recently held an off-the-record meeting with “dozens of conservative columnists, reporters, and bloggers,” followed by interviews last week with two of the sites represented at the meeting, Hot Air and Townhall. One attendee at the private sit-down said Romney’s message to conservatives is “we want you on our side and working with the campaign.”
4. He has no reason not to stick with Fox
Appearing on Fox News gives Romney a lot of advantages, says The Moderate Voice‘s Gandelman. Like other Republican candidates, he is almost guaranteed as much air time as he wants, “where the candidate can regurgitate talking points” in front of huge amounts of right-leaning voters. Plus, if he makes a verbal misstep, “more likely than not his interviewer would gloss over the gaffe, try to discreetly explain it away, and re-ask the question.” It’s smart PR, and today, unlike a decade ago, “Romney can get away with it.”
5. He’s getting bad advice
Can you really “run for the presidency more or less exclusively through Fox News?” says Richard K. Barry at Lippmann’s Ghost. Maybe: After all, the only people who really pay attention to public affairs programs are political junkies and reporters. But “I think it is foolish to try.” Not only is it risky to alienate reporters who help shape the campaign narrative, but I doubt ignoring the press “plays well with the mainstream of the country, the kind of people you need to vote for you outside your conservative base if you hope to win the presidency.”
By: The Week, Best Opinion, May 29, 2012
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