Ryan: Norman Schwarzkopf or G.A. Custer?

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In Winston Churchill's memoir of the Second World War, he relates his reaction to the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor: "I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful."

When I heard the news that Mitt Romney had selected Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, I thought Barack Obama must have done the same.

Because, while the Rabid Right may be patting themselves on the back and admiring the "bold stroke" of choosing Ryan, and the Beltway pundits like to wax rhapsodic over Ryan's "gutsy" budget plan, I can think of nothing Etch A Sketch Romney could have done that's more certain to ensure his eventual defeat.

You know how I know Ryan is a terrible pick? One of his biggest backers was the affable boob Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, who's frequently seen grinning his way across your TV screen and spouting nonsense, a veritable fountain of specious claptrap The two things Kristol's most famous for urging the GOP to embrace are Sarah Palin and the Iraq War, which he said would "pay for itself." How'd those work out?

Kristol gets props from his buddies in the Beltway media for urging the Republicans to be "bolder" and more "ambitious," as commentator Dylan Byers wrote in Politico. But in reality, he's like the half-bright, overly aggressive major general who's always urging some lunatic charge into the enemy guns that gets a lot of his men killed.

Insiders have been reporting for some time now that the Obama campaign had been trying to tie Romney to Ryan's proposed budget plans. Because here's the thing: Once people find out what's actually in the budget, it's highly unpopular, particularly his proposal to give more huge tax breaks to millionaires and pay for it by turning Medicare into a "voucher" system, where seniors would get coupons to buy insurance from private insurers.

A Washington Post/Kaiser Foundation poll this month asked people whether they favored keeping the current structure of Medicare, or going to a system "in which the government guarantees each senior a fixed amount of money to help them purchase coverage either from traditional Medicare or from a list of private health plans." Fifty-eight percent rejected the change.

You can see why, if you think about it. Given the amount of confusion and the grumbling of senior citizens over trying to choose between the various options in George Dubbya's budget-busting Medicare Part D plan (which Ryan voted for, by the way), I find it unlikely that they're going to welcome the fun and excitement of haggling with dozens of insurance companies over their coverage.

This is especially true since repealing the Affordable Care Act (which Ryan supports) means the insurance companies will once more be free to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. How many people do you know over 65 who don't have some kind of pre-existing condition?

It gets worse when you look at the rest of the plan. A recent Democracy Corps survey showed that "President Obama's lead against Romney more than doubles when the election is framed as a choice between the two candidates' positions on the Ryan budget - particularly its impact on the most vulnerable." And if the Obama campaign has shown one thing recently, it's that they know how to define an opponent and his positions.

You want to know how bad it gets for the Ryan plan? According to a report in The New York Times, when the pro-Obama SuperPac Priorities USA (they of the infamous "Bain Capital Killed My Wife" ad) was doing focus groups to determine what tack to take, they found that attacks on the Ryan budget plan and Romney's support of it didn't do all that well.

First because no one really knew anything about Ryan or what was in the plan, and second, because once people heard that it called for "ending Medicare as we know it" while giving bigger tax breaks to millionaires, "they refused to believe any politician would do such a thing."

Well, now they're going to hear about the plan, right from the blue-eyed horse's mouth, and the evidence is pretty clear that they're not going to like it at all. Bill Kristol and the Raging Right may think Romney's "boldness" in picking Ryan makes him into Gen. Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf.

In reality, it may turn out to be more like Custer - except this time, Custer spent the day before Little Big Horn handing out quivers full of arrows for the Indians to shoot him with.

GUESS WHO SAID IT?

'The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends."

'Help' Romney Didn't Need

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I really wasn’t going to do another column about Mitt Romney this week. Really. I promise. But I can’t help it. On Wednesday, they served up a pitch that’s so slow and easy, I just have to take a whack at it.

It all started when Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul responded to an ad that was created by one of those SuperPACs that are so thick on the ground this year. The ad, titled “Understands,” features a former steelworker named Joe Soptic.

The plant where Soptic worked was shut down by Romney’s company, Bain Capital. Soptic lost his health insurance. His wife was diagnosed with cancer and died because, the ad implies, she couldn’t afford to go to the doctor until she got too sick to ignore her symptoms, and by then it was too late. Mrs. Soptic died 22 days after being diagnosed.

“I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone,” Soptic concludes. “And furthermore, I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned.” Basically, Soptic says, Mitt Romney and his company are responsible for his wife’s death, and the MittBot doesn’t care. Wow. That’s gonna leave a mark.

Now, as it turns out, Soptic’s wife didn’t get sick till several years after Soptic lost his job, and she had health insurance from her own job for part of that time. The aforementioned Ms. Saul pointed that out. But then she stepped in it, big time. “If people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan,” she told Fox News, “they would have had health care.”

This was most likely true, and to any normal candidate, it would have been a major selling point. But Romney is not a normal candidate. He’s a guy who’s trying very hard to distance himself from his biggest achievement as governor: the health plan that was the model for the national health plan he now vows to repeal, because if he didn’t promise that, he wouldn’t get the nomination.

So saying “Governor Romney’s health care plan might have saved this woman’s life” was actually exactly the wrong thing to say. If you needed any more proof that American politics in 2012 is completely insane, you need look no further than that.

I suppose one can’t blame Ms. Saul too much. After all, when you work for a guy who changes his stances on issues more times that most people change positions in their sleep, it must keep getting harder and harder to keep everything straight.

That didn’t stop the right wing from going completely haywire over the statement. Even more than usual, I mean. Rush Limbaugh said that “Andrea Saul’s appearance on Fox was a potential gold mine for Obama supporters.” Ann Coulter demanded that Saul be fired if Romney ever wanted any more contributions from conservatives.

Erick Erickson of CNN and the flagship right wing blog RedState called it “a mind-numbingly bit of spin [sic] that may mark the day the Romney campaign died.” Erickson noted that the right wing had never really trusted or warmed to Romney, and this wasn’t helping: “Consider the scab picked, the wound opened, and the distrust trickling out again.”

Euuuwww. Nice image there, Erick.

The assertion that this “may mark the day the Romney campaign died” is probably as overwrought as the original ad. But Team Romney does seem to be experiencing the Death of a Thousand Cuts, almost all of them self-inflicted. They’re creating an impression that’s worse for them than the perception that they’re flip-floppers or that they don’t tell the truth — they look inept.

People may be willing to overlook a little flip-flopping or even a little mendacity as something that politicians on both sides do. But when one of the overriding themes of your campaign is that your guy is this cool, experienced, uber-competent CEO who can manage us out of the crisis, ineptitude may be the only unforgivable sin.

When your message is “You’re in a hole and our guy can get you out of it,” it doesn’t help if you act like you don’t know which end of the shovel is which.

This is especially true when you’re going up against the guy that ended the Iraq War, got real health care reform done when no one thought he could, gave the orders that killed Osama bin Laden, saved the auto industry, and presided over 29 months of job growth despite an obstructive House determined to keep things bad for political gain.

AND he can sing on-key.

Romney Gaffes: A Bug Or a Feature?

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There’s a well-worn cliche among computer geeks that goes: “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

It started as a way to deflect criticism of software that just didn’t work as advertised (or failed to work at all) by claiming that whatever weird glitch was driving the user up the wall was always intended to be that way.

For a while there, I was wondering if “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” might explain the recent Mitt Romney International Gaffe Tour 2012.

As you may have read, Romney kicked things off by dissing the British hosts of the Olympics on his first stop, earning the unenviable nickname of “Mitt the Twit” from the tabloid newspaper The Sun, and worse epithets from several others.

He then went to Israel, where he told a crowd that Jews in Israel were more successful than the Palestinians because of their “culture,” which managed to be both a slam at the Palestinians and more than a little stereotypical of the Jews — after all, wasn’t Romney just trotting out the old anti-Semitic trope that “Jews are good with money”?

Of course, this also fails to take into account that maybe, just maybe, the Palestinian economy is struggling because their movements are severely restricted and a good chunk of the country is sequestered behind a 25-foot wall. Just a thought.

Then it was on to Poland, where a Romney press spokesman responded to shouted questions from frustrated reporters by snarling, “Kiss my [rude word]; this is a holy site for the Polish people. Show some respect.”

Am I the only one who finds “Kiss my [rude word]; this is a holy site” hilarious? The spokesman then told a reporter to “shove it,” in a way that suggested he wasn’t giving advice on getting the doorknob unstuck.

Now, at first glance, all of this may have made Romney and his people look inept and unprofessional. But then I had second thoughts. After all, even now, Romney’s still trying to shore up his credibility with the Rabid Right.

And what better way to do that than treating other countries (even allies) with contempt, kicking the Palestinians in the teeth, and telling the press to “kiss my [rude word]”? Were all these gaffes a “bug” in the campaign software or a “feature”?

But when you dig a little deeper, you find that these missteps were just the tip of the gaffe-berg. There were others, like Romney having to cancel a fundraising dinner in Israel because it was scheduled on a holy day of fasting.

He also praised the Israeli health care system for keeping health care costs at “8 percent of GDP,” forgetting perhaps that the Israeli National Health Insurance Law “sets forth the state’s responsibility to provide health services for all residents of the country,” according to their Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

And yes, there’s an individual mandate. Romney praising “socialism”? That’s gotta be a gaffe-and-a-half.

But it was Romney’s treatment of the press that finally answered the question for me. It wasn’t just the guy telling off reporters. Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren griped that there’d been no press access to the MittBot in Poland and that reporters felt like they were “in a petting zoo … trapped in a bus while Polish citizens take pictures of us.”

Here’s the thing: You can trash talk the press, you can put them in crowded buses, you can put them up in roach motels — but you cannot deny them some sort of access, even if it’s illusory. They’ll sell their souls for the thrill and the prestige of feeling like they’re “inside” with the movers and shakers.

A candidate who gives them that thrill can tell them the most outrageous lies, and they’ll print them verbatim, singing the candidate’s praises all the while, extolling his “manliness” and explaining away his gaffes. You can feed them total BS, but you can’t starve them.

George Dubbya Bush was great at it. John McCain cooked baby back ribs for the press and let them ride the tire swing at one of his houses. They loved the guy, giving him pass after pass.

Time’s Mark Halperin even earnestly argued that McCain not remembering how many houses he had was “terrible news for Barack Obama.”

But remember when Sarah Palin’s press spokeswoman responded to a question about whether Palin would take questions by jeering, “From who? From you? Who cares?” How’d that work out for her?

So, on third thought, I’m going to have to go with inept. This trip showed one thing: Mitt Romney is not ready for the world stage.

How to Speak Wingnut

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Talking or conversing online with a member of the Rabid Right can often be a frustrating experience. It often seems like the two of you are talking past each other.

This is because while wingnuts speak something that appears to be English, they're not really speaking the same language as you. They use a sort of argot or cant, made up of dog-whistles and code words whose full and deeper meaning is only understood by them or people like them.

So here's a helpful guide in understanding wingnut speech, or, as I call it, Wingspeak:

What they say: "Obama was never properly vetted. We don't know anything about him."

What they mean: "We've dug and dug but none of us has ever been able to turn up a shred of credible evidence for all of the ridiculous stuff we've made up about Barack Obama."

What they say: "The press is covering up this story."

What they mean: "The press won't report our half-truths, distortions and outright lies as if they were facts."

What they say: "The press has a liberal bias."

What they mean: "The press keeps finding out true but damaging things about us."

What they say: "We need to cut spending."

What they mean: "We need to stop giving money to black and poor people so the government can pay for my retirement and health care."

What they say: "We need entitlement reform."

What they mean: "For every entitlement but the ones I get."

What they say: "Government can't create jobs."

What they mean: "Government shouldn't spend money to create jobs except for ones resulting from defense, road or bridge projects in my district."

What they say: "I know it isn't politically correct to say this, but..."

What they mean: "I am about to say something incredibly racist, sexist or just pig-ignorant, and I want to look like I'm daring and edgy instead of a brain-dead boob."

What they say: "You just call everyone who disagrees with you a racist!"

What they mean: "I say racist stuff all the time, but maybe if I play the aggrieved, falsely accused victim, I can get away with it."

What they say: "You just call people names because you haven't got any real arguments!"

What they mean: "I'm going to hope people ignore the fact that you just used actual evidence to clean my clock in this argument by self-righteously feigning indignation over the way you said it."

What they say: "Barack Obama isn't a real American."

What they mean: "Obama is black."

What they say: "Barack Obama doesn't love America."

What they mean: "Obama is black."

What they say: "Barack Obama wasn't born here, he was born in Kenya."

What they mean: "Obama is black."

What they say: "Barack Obama should release his college transcripts."

What they mean: "He couldn't have legitimately gotten into college and done as well as he did without getting special treatment, because he's, you know, black."

What they say: "Mitt Romney should release his tax returns only when President Obama releases his school records."

What they mean: "We're positive there's something in those tax returns that will destroy Romney's candidacy, so we'll come up with any flimsy non sequitur to try and excuse why he shouldn't release them. Also, Obama should release his school records because he's, you know, black."

What they say: "Obamacare is socialism!"

What they mean: "We don't really have any idea what's actually the Affordable Care Act, but we know this: We don't like socialism, we don't like Obama, and we don't like this plan, even though it was originally proposed by Republicans, because this time it was backed by a guy who's a Democrat and, you know, black, so we're going to call it something that sounds impressive and ominous, even though it clearly shows we know as much about socialism as we know about quantum physics."

What they say: "President Obama is engaging in Chicago-style gutter politics."

What they mean: "Obama's using the same hardball tactics against us that we've used to win every election we've succeeded in, and doing it better, since the stuff he's saying is actually true."

What they say: "The Obama campaign is getting desperate."

What they mean: "We're getting hurt badly by the latest round of revelations."

As a general rule of thumb, when they say, "How dare those awful liberals (fill in supposed outrage here)," what they mean is "You can't do that! Only we can do that!"

Hope this helps.

Mitt's Painted Into a Corner

 The Pilot: Southern Pines, NC, July 22, 2012

First a quick correction: Last week, as a couple of readers pointed out, I had a brain fluff and mentioned the "Republican-controlled Senate."

Clearly it's the House the Republicans control, and I could have sworn that's what I wrote. But, sure enough, the original column has the mistake right there, plain as day. Mea culpa. It's the Republican-controlled House that's wasting precious time and millions of taxpayer dollars on votes that are little more than stunts meant to do nothing but generate ads for the fall. Hope this clears things up.

Anyway, it seems that Willard Mitt "Etch a Sketch" Romney has gotten himself into another hilarious pickle with his zany antics. Romney's been basing his entire campaign message around "trust me to fix the economy, I'm a big shot businessman who made bunches and bunches of money."

Well, I guess he can't run on his single four-year term as an actual chief executive, during which his signature achievement was a health care reform plan that provided the blueprint for the Affordable Care Act - you know, the so-called "Obamacare" that the current GOP hates with the burning intensity of a thousand suns, despite the fact it was originally a Republican idea.

No, he can't run on his record as the moderate governor of "Taxachusetts." The Rabid Right would eat him for lunch. So he's made his biggest selling point his tenure as the top kahuna of a bewildering set of interlocking entities known as Bain Capital.

Until, that is, people (including fellow Republicans Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry) started pointing out that some of Bain's strategies for making money from the companies it took over looked uncomfortably like one of those "bust out" scenarios from "Goodfellas" or "The Sopranos": Move in, use the company's credit to jack up its debt and pay themselves big fees with the borrowed money, then, if "restructuring" (usually involving firing a lot of people and moving jobs overseas) didn't turn things around, declare bankruptcy and walk away with pockets full of cash.

It was the accusations of "offshoring" jobs overseas that really got Mitt's goat. He had nothing to do with that, he insisted. His official campaign statement said that "Governor Romney left Bain Capital in February of 1999 to run the Olympics and had no input on investments or management of companies after that point."

Then The Boston Globe found documents filed with the SEC and signed by Romney that told a different story. As just one filing from Feb. 20, 2001 put it: "Mr. W. Mitt Romney is the sole shareholder, sole director, chief executive officer and president of Bain Capital and thus [and this is the important part] is the controlling person of Bain Capital." Oops.

The Romney campaign went into frantic spin mode, spamming Mitt's mug across five networks in one day to explain how a person described in legally required filings as the "controlling person" in 2001 wasn't really in control in 2001. "Who you gonna believe," the defense ran, "me, or those lyin' documents with my signature on them?"

It reached the height of absurdity when Romney surrogate Ed Gillespie earnestly explained that Romney had "retroactively" retired from Bain in 2002, after which late night comedians such as Jon Stewart and Conan O'Brian were seen literally dancing for joy at the gift they'd been handed.

Now it may be entirely true that Romney, despite what he said at the time, had no say in the "day to day" running of Bain. But does that really help Romney? Isn't that one of the things that disgusts people about corporate America - that required regulatory filings are just a sham, that no one's accountable, even though they say they are, and that this all seems perfectly normal to the mainstream corporate-owned media?

Are the American people really supposed to believe that that the guy who embraces this sort of corporate gamesmanship, obfuscation, and skullduggery is the solution to the problems in the economy? Finally, what's Romney going to do now that he's being forced to distance himself from the very experience he's touting as his main qualification for the White House?

I'm thinking he's got nothing. Which means we'll be hearing more lies about "socialism" and "apologizing for America" and attacks on the president's patriotism, interspersed with whining about how mean Obama is and demands for apologies that won't happen, all of which only serve to make Mittens look like a weak, ineffectual chump (see "Kerry, John: 2004 campaign").

Meanwhile, "where are the tax returns?" will become the Democratic version of "where's the birth certificate?"

It's going to be a long campaign. For Romney.