Sluice Tundra, Private Eye In: The Case of the Murdered Party (Part Two)

Opinion | thepilot.com

(In our last installment, Sluice Tundra, Private Eye, was pulled out of retirement by a mysterious woman and hired to find out who killed the Republican Party.)

I decided to start right at the top, with the chairman. I found him in his office, looking as nervous as a cat at the Westminster Dog Show.

“Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Prius,” I said.

His expression changed from anxious to annoyed.

“It’s Priebus,” he said. “Reince Priebus.”

“Right,” I said. “So tell me, Raunch …”

“Reince,” he corrected me.

“OK, Rinse. I was seeing if you knew anything about who might have killed your party.”

“Killed?” he said, sweat breaking on his brow. “It’s not dead.” He took out a hankie and wiped his face. “It’s fine. Everything’s going to be fine. Really.” His right eye started to twitch. “We’re going to unite behind the nominee. Mr. … Mr. …”

“Trump,” I said.

He visibly flinched. “Yeah. Him.”

I could tell I was getting nowhere with this guy. He was deeper in denial than a Sanders supporter looking at the delegate count. “You have a nice day, Mr. Peebles.”

He stopped shaking and looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Are you doing that on purpose, or are you just an idiot?” he said.

“You’ll never know,” I said.

Next, I decided to pay a visit to the governor. He was seated on the veranda at his palatial Massachusetts mansion. I was startled to see a short, balding guy standing behind him, running a comb through his perfect hair.

“William Kristol?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

Kristol gave me a contemptuous look and whispered something in the governor’s ear.

“Bill here is talking to me about running as a protest candidate,” the governor said.

“You know he’s always wrong, don’t you?” I said. “I mean, like, always.”

Kristol whispered again. “He says you’re one of the takers. The 47 percent. Why should I talk to you when you’ll never vote for me anyway?”

“Whatever,” I said. “If you want to run, all I can say is what another guy said to you last time.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“Please proceed, governor.”

“Get out!” he bellowed. I did.

Next, I headed down to Texas to talk to The Cowboy. I found him hard at work on his ranch, engaged in his favorite pastime: clearing brush.

“Wow,” I said. “I would have thought you’d have cleared away all the brush after this many years.”

“No problemo, amigo,” he said. “I have new brush trucked in every night.”

“Amazing. So, what do you know about who might have killed the Republican Party?”

He stopped clearing for a moment and eyed me suspiciously. “That sounds like the kind of traitoristical talk that risks emboldenating our enemies.”

“What?”

“Remember, muchacho, you’re either with us or with the terrorists. Hey, would you like to see one of my paintings? I have a new self-portrait of me in the bathtub.”

“Um … thanks, but no thanks.”

I got out of there as quickly as I could. I felt like I was running out of options. I had one more visit to make.

Suddenly, everything clicked into place. I had the answer. I dialed the woman who’d hired me, who I knew only as “dollface,” “kitten” or “precious” — at least until now. I got her voice mail.

“Meet me at my old office,” I said. “I have the answer.”

She arrived just as I was pulling the dust covers off the furniture. “Take a seat, angel,” I said. “Or should I call you … Gov. Palin?”

She hesitated, then pulled the mask off, revealing the face of the half-term governor of Alaska. “Guess you think you’re pretty smart, doncha, big fella?” she sneered. “Well, smart don’t feed the bulldog there sonny, not in the real America where we’re gun-clingin’, Bible-slingin’…”

“Can it, sister,” I said. “I know you did it. But you didn’t do it alone.”

She looked confused. Maybe she always looked like that. “I didn’t?”

“No. All of you did. You pretended to be pushing low taxes and limited government, but all you were really selling was fear. Fear and resentment. Fear of Scary Brown People, and resentment of anyone you could convince people was getting something they weren’t. You also promised people things you couldn’t deliver. You were going to ‘deport all the illegals’ and repeal ‘every word of Obamacare.’ But you couldn’t. And after a while, someone came along who did fear and resentment better than anyone. You all created this monster, and now he’s going to eat your party alive while he takes it over a cliff.”

“Wow,” Palin said. “I thought I was bad about mixing metaphors.”

I got up and showed her to the door.

“I got a million of ’em, toots. Now scram.”

If I hurried, I could still make the Early Bird Special at the Retirement Home for Private Eyes.

Just What IS Conservatism, Anyway? Even They Don't Seem To Know

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She’s baaaaack. And some conservatives aren’t as happy as you might expect.

Political humorists recently broke into hosannas of delirious joy at the return of the Mama Grizzly herself, the half-term governor of Alaska, the one, the only, Sarah Palin.

The Quitta from Wasilla recently made a surprise appearance at a rally in Iowa to endorse the current flag-bearer for her patented politics of resentment, Donald J. Trump.

Let me just say, her speech did not disappoint those of us looking forward to the return of authentic Palin gibberish:

“We’re talking about no more Reaganesque power that comes from strength. Power through strength. Well, then, we’re talking about our very existence, so no, we’re not going to chill. In fact, it’s time to drill, baby, drill down, and hold these folks accountable.”

It goes on like this for pages. It’s classic Palin word salad, a barely coherent torrent of buzzwords, talking points, dog-whistles and callbacks to imagined slights. Perhaps the funniest thing about Tina Fey’s inevitable lampoon of Palin’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live” was that many of the biggest laugh lines were lifted verbatim from Palin’s actual speech.

But Trump and Palin’s audience lapped up the original and hooted for more. They seem to adore the illusion of authenticity provided by talented hucksters who dispense with speechwriters and just come out and spout whatever nonsense they think will sell. Who cares that they make no freaking sense? At least they ain’t using no teleprompter, am I right? Haw! Teleprompter! Like Obummer!

This sort of thing is starting to worry those on the right who would like to tell us that “conservatism” is an actual intellectual movement based around rational ideas of small government and lower taxes, rather than the roiling, white-hot ball of xenophobia, bigotry, rage and fear that Trump calls “conservatism.”

The concern has grown to the point where a recent cover story in National Review was titled “Against Trump.” In that issue, various right-wing “thinkers” lined up to take their shots at their party’s frontrunner.

Glenn Beck (the reason I just surrounded the word “thinkers” with quotes) pointed out Trump’s vocal support for Barack Obama’s much-despised yet highly effective stimulus package. The Cato Institute’s David Boaz worried about the cult of personality around Trump, calling him “the American Mussolini … concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat.”

Ben Domenech, publisher of the conservative magazine The Federalist, wrote that “conservatives should reject Trump’s hollow, Euro-style identity politics.”

Problem is, for some people, “conservatism” means exactly “identity politics.” It’s all about Us vs. Them. It’s about “Taking Our Country Back” (from Those People). It’s about the “Real America” (which is not where Those People live).

The GOP calls itself the conservative party, but then it nominates the poster girl for “Euro-style white Christian identity politics” to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. When it started to go south, alleged conservatives like Bill Kristol (who, lest we forget, is always wrong) continued to defend her even as she dragged the party down to a humiliating defeat.

As for Mr. Boaz’s concerns that Trump isn’t a real conservative because he might “concentrate power in the White House” — well, when you have hosts on Fox News swooning over murdering imperialist autocrats like Vladimir Putin because, in the words of Rudy Giuliani, he “makes a decision and he executes it, quickly, then everybody reacts … that’s what you call a leader” — well, then, it’s hard to really know what the conservatives’ beef is with Trump’s alleged prospective consolidation of power.

The response of Gov. Palin to the concerns of those who are supposedly her fellow travelers? “Give me a break! Who are they to say that? Oh, tell somebody like Phyllis Schlafly — she is the Republican, conservative movement icon and hero and a Trump supporter — tell her she’s not conservative. How ’bout the rest of us? Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our God, and our religions, and our Constitution. Tell us that we’re not red enough? Yeah, coming from the establishment. Right.”

The biggest problem with American conservatives in the past few years is that they’ve passively allowed their brand to be used by people like Palin, Trump, Giuliani, et al., who use the word to describe a philosophy of autocracy, paranoia, resentment and exclusion of everyone not like them. Now, it seems, they’re trying to push back, but it may be too little, too late.

If Donald Trump is allowed to take the Republican nomination and run as a conservative candidate, then “conservatism” will be a dirty word in this country for the next hundred years. And it will have deserved its fate.

The First Clown Out of the Car

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

It has begun. And I couldn’t be happier.

By “it,” I mean the Republican primary season, which got a surprise start this past Monday when Toddler-Terrifyin’ Ted Cruz followed up his epic speech in which he yelled at a 3-year-old that “your whole world is on fire!” in the only way possible: by forgoing the usual “exploratory committee” fundraising dance and announcing that he’s running for the presidency.

Why does this make me so happy? Because when you write the type of columns that I write, you greet the first announcement of a Republican candidacy with the same glee a circus-loving child feels when the first clown dances and struts his way into the center ring, only to be sprayed with water and knocked on his keister by a big-shoed, red-nosed rival. You just know there’s going to be a hilarious multi-clown free-for-all and big belly laughs ahead.

The first hand holding the metaphorical seltzer bottle directed at Sen. Cruz belonged to the only man in the field of prospective candidates who’s nuttier than Cruz himself, by which I mean the Bellowing Baron of Birtherism his own bad self, Mr. Donald Trump.

Trump, in a phone interview with MyFox New York, used the classic dodge of “I’m not making accusations, I’m just wondering” to try to cast doubt on Cruz’s eligibility to run: “He was born in Canada. If you know, and when we all studied our history lessons, you are supposed to be born in this country, so I just don’t know how the courts will rule on this.”

He also accused Cruz of stealing his lines.

“The line of ‘Make America great again,’ the phrase — that was mine. I came up with it about a year ago,” Trump said, “and I kept using it, and everybody’s now using it. … Maybe I should copyright it. Maybe I have copyrighted it.”

I have certainly enjoyed a major chuckle watching the zombified corpse of birtherism raised from the Earth by a Republican and sicced on one of his own kind. And I look forward to the day when everyone who uses the phrase “make America great again” gets a “cease and desist” letter from The Donald’s lawyers.

That’s what made this country great in the first place, after all: the monetization of patriotic sentiment. Which reminds me: I need to beef up my investments in companies that make flag pins. Never mind that they’re all in China now. But I digress.

Meanwhile, in another ring of the circus, the JEB! Bush campaign slipped on its first banana peel as former Secretary of State James Baker, who’s been an adviser to JEB! on foreign policy matters, had the temerity to criticize the right’s latest poster boy, Our Friend Bibi.

Baker, who was secretary of state for JEB!’s daddy, called OFB’s recent moves “diplomatic missteps and political gamesmanship” at an event for the liberal Jewish organization J Street. Predictably, this did not sit well with the people who love America so much that they’d rather see a foreigner like Netanyahu or even Vladimir Putin in charge of it.

“Bush can’t let Baker’s appearance at the J Street event go unremarked upon,” wrote Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary magazine. “He must either explicitly distance himself from Baker’s appearance and from J Street’s support for Obama’s threats against Israel, or ask Baker to formally disassociate himself from his presidential effort.”

Other critics of Baker’s words included Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard — who, as we all know from reading our history, is always, always wrong.

“OK, OK,” the JEB! campaign said, and tried to do what the Israel hawks asked. They sent a mass email stating that JEB! “disagrees with the sentiments he [Baker] expressed last night and opposes J Street’s advocacy. Governor Bush’s support for Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu is unwavering.”

Not good enough, the Israel hawks cried.

“Bush’s statements remain generic, and his demeanor does not convey passion,” groused Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post’s “Right Turn” column. Apparently, nothing will satisfy the Pro-Israel Purity Police until JEB! hauls the elderly Baker up to the podium, gives him a vicious forehand-backhand slap and screams at him to “shut his filthy mouth” about OFB.

I tell you, folks, watching these people whack away at one another for the next few months is going to provide hours of the finest slapstick entertainment, not to mention fodder for a couple of dozen columns at least. The only way I could be happier is if Sarah Palin threw her hat back in the ring. … But no. That would be too much to hope for.

Stay tuned, and pass the popcorn. The debates are going to be epic.

Boehner: PAY NO ATTENTION TO THOSE WINGNUTS BEHIND THE CURTAIN!

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Will the Republicans in the House actually impeach President Obama? I don’t know, but the recent furor over the question has provided us with the hilarious spectacle of one-half of the party trying desperately to keep people from noticing what the other half is doing.

Some Republicans, of course, have been muttering the “I” word since Mr. Obama’s election. The carping got louder when they found, to their shock, that they couldn’t beat him in 2012. Recently, the issue burst back onto the national conversation as the Queen of Wingnuttia herself, failed vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, wrote an inflammatory op-ed for the current flagship for right-wing lunacy, the website Breitbart.com.

“It’s time to impeach,” the Quitta From Wasilla said flatly. “Enough is enough of the years of abuse from this president. His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, ‘No mas.’”

Well, I guess comparing not getting your political way to being an abused spouse is more classy than their usual complaint of being just like chattel slaves or Holocaust victims, but not by much.

Conservative pundit Smilin’ Bill Kristol, usually a Palin cheerleader, was unequivocal in his rejection of the whole idea of impeachment. He directly responded to Palin’s call on ABC’s “This Week” by flatly declaring, “No responsible elected official has called for impeachment.”

That one had to sting, because Kristol has always pushed Palin’s seriousness as a political voice. Of course, this means that impeachment is inevitable, because, as we all know, Bill Kristol is always, always wrong.

Orange John Boehner was even firmer in his denial, claiming that the “whole talk about impeachment” was a “scam” started by Democratic fundraisers to try to drum up contributions for the upcoming election. It’s all “coming from the president’s own staff and Democrats on Capitol Hill.”

This should come as a surprise to:

— Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who told Breitbart News Saturday, “From my standpoint, if the president [enacts more executive actions], we need to bring impeachment hearings immediately before the House of Representatives. That’s my position, and that’s my prediction.”

— Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who told a radio interviewer: “Not a day goes by when people don’t talk to us about impeachment. I don’t know what rises to that level yet, but I know that there’s a mounting frustration that a lot of people are getting to, and I think Congress is going to start looking at it very seriously.”

— Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.), who, according to another story on Breitbart.com, “told colleagues that the House should pass legislation with new steps to secure the border, and tell Obama if he didn’t implement it, they would impeach him.”

— Rep. Marilinda Garcia (R-N.H.), who said she’d vote for impeachment because, according to her, the president “has many, many impeachable offenses, it seems to me, in terms of his disregard for our Constitution alone.”

And of course, no parade of wingnuts would be complete without its grand marshal, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Bedlam), who stopped short of calling for immediate impeachment, then immediately claimed it’s “what the people want.”

“There isn’t a weekend that hasn’t gone by,” she said, “that someone says to me, ‘Michele, what in the world are you all waiting for in Congress? Why aren’t you impeaching the president?”

While it is highly likely that the “someone” she refers to is one of the voices buzzing in her head, she and her pals in the Teahadist Caucus seem awfully fixated on something that their alleged leader says is a Democratic idea.

Did all of these people (and a half-dozen other House Republicans who have either outright called for impeachment or who can’t stop talking about unspecified “impeachable offenses”) join the White House staff or cross the aisle to the Dem side when we weren’t looking?

John Boehner knows the lessons of history. He knows that the doomed impeachment effort against President Bill Clinton caused Clinton’s popularity ratings to skyrocket. He also knows that while impeachment is a big seller among Republicans, less than a third of the general electorate favors it, and 63 percent of independents flat out oppose it.

So, in a weak imitation of the Great and Powerful Oz, Orange John is bellowing for us to “pay no attention to those Republicans behind the curtain!” while pushing his own substitute: a lawsuit against President Obama’s delay in enacting a law the House has tried to repeal so many times I’ve lost count.

Sadly, Boehner is neither great nor powerful. His caucus is out of control and pushing not solutions to problems, but bogus lawsuits and political grandstanding. That’s what the Democrats are raising money to fight. They’re right to do so.

Look, How Wrong Can You Be?

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

The office was cramped and cluttered, with dusty posters of old TV personalities on the wall: Edward R. Murrow, Howard K. Smith, Walter Cronkite. The single window behind the desk was half open, letting in the noise from the street below.

“So, you wanna be on the network news talk shows,” the man behind the desk said.

He was a big man with a florid, jowly face and a cigar stuck in one corner of his mouth. He had his suit coat off, and his short sleeves were rolled up. The name plate on his desk read, “Mort Nuttman, Talent Agent.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “See, I’ve been writing this political column for years, and I think I know a lot about the subject. I was wondering if maybe I could be one of those high-paid TV pundits.”

Nuttman grunted. He opened the folder of columns I’d brought and scanned through them. After a moment, he set it down. He looked at me, up and down, for a long moment, without speaking. “The question is,” Nuttman said finally, “how wrong can you be?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Look,” he said, “You wanna make the big money as a guest pundit on the big shows — “This Week,” “Fox and Friends,” “Situation Room” — you gotta show that you can be completely wrong. Not just once, but over and over. Look at the heavy hitters — Bill Kristol, Dick Morris, The Cheneys, Palin, even John McCain. You know what they have in common?”

“They were all wrong?”

“You bet they were!”

“I don’t know if I can be like those guys,” I said. “I’m kind of center-left.”

He rolled his eyes. “Dear Lord,” he moaned. “Not a liberal.”

“That’s a problem?”

He shook his head. “Liberals are hard to work with, pal. They show up with facts, and figures, and” he made air quotes with his fingers and put a sneer in his voice, “reee-search.”

“Facts are bad?” I said.

“Facts make people change the channel,” he said. “I don’t need another Alan Colmes on my client roster.”

“Who?”

“Exactly. Now, if you were an actual liberal, you’d be dead in the water.”

“What about Rachel Maddow?”

He waved a hand dismissively “One show. One network. Plus, she’s a looker. The big money’s in being able to do a lot of shows, and it’s easier to do that if you’re a far-right wacko. More entertaining. We can work around the ‘center-left’ thing, like we did with James Carville and Bill Maher. But you’ve got to be willing to do what it takes to grab people. Now, yell!”

“What?”

“C’mon, yell! See if you can drown me out.”

I was confused. “Yell what?”

He handed me a piece of paper. “This script’ll do.” He began talking in a calm, measured voice. “One thing that makes the current border crisis more complicated is the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which was signed by President George W. Bush…”

I looked down at the paper and began to read at the top of my lungs. “WHEN IS OBAMA GOING TO STOP BLAMING BUSH FOR EVERYTHING?!” I hollered, doing my best to shout Nuttman down. “A COUNTRY THAT CAN’T PROTECT ITS BORDERS IS NO COUNTRY AT ALL! AAAAAAH!”

I stopped and looked up. He was nodding.

“OK,” he said, “good projection, just the right edge of barely controlled rage. We might have something here. But you still need to have been wrong a lot.” He sat back down. “So,” he said. “Were you in favor of the Iraq War? Do you still think it was a good idea?”

“Oh, God, no,” I said. “It was a debacle that should never have happened.”

Nuttman grimaced. “How about Romney? Were you predicting he’d score a landslide win over Obama as late as Nov. 6, 2012?”

“What are you, nuts?”

He pressed on. “Did you predict that Obamacare enrollment numbers weren’t going to reach predicted levels?”

“Nope.”

He sighed. “Sorry, pal. You just don’t have what it takes.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “The people who have been consistently wrong about everything get to pull down fat salaries on TV? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you think this is, kid? News? This is infotainment. No one likes people who are right. Audiences like people who agree with them. Loudly.”

“Even if they’re wrong?”

“Especially if they’re wrong. People who know they’re wrong want someone to tell them they’re right, so they never have to admit it.”

I shook my head. “I hate to say it,” I said, “but you’re right.”

“Don’t let it get around,” he said.

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.

Chris Christie: The Second Coming?

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A busted clock is right twice a day. Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then. And it appears that William Kristol has actually been right about something. These are, as Paul Simon sings, days of miracle and wonder.
I know I've been awfully hard on Smilin' Bill, the amiable boob who's the editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard and who's been popping up for years on the Sunday panel shows, grinning like a possum eating persimmons and spouting utter nonsense like "The Iraq War will cost at most $200 billion," "Sarah Palin's resignation won't hurt her chance at the Republican nomination and anyone who says different is afraid of her," and other lack-witted pronouncements.
Kristol is the guy who's often caused me to offer my services to the networks, because I can be just as wrong for half the price.
However, after the last Republican debate, Kristol wrote a "special editorial" on the Weekly Standard's website and summed up the Republican field in one word: "Yikes!" He went on to say that "none of the candidates really seemed up to the moment, either politically or substantively. In the midst of a crisis, we're getting politics as usual - and a somewhat subpar version of politics as usual at that."
He quoted a "bright young conservative" who'd emailed him in dismay: "WE SOUND LIKE CRAZY PEOPLE!!!!" He also rather glumly quoted my favorite poem, Yeats' "The Second Coming," to describe the choices before Republicans: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
So far, so good. And so right. Kristol, however, can't stay correct for long, and his solution was typically dimwitted: Call in Chris Christie, the corpulent New Jersey governor, whom Kristol calls "a big man for a big job."
Problem is, Christie's said over and over that he's not running. His poll numbers in his own state are awful. He also appointed a judge who's a Muslim to the bench and called people who protested "crazy" and their concerns about the imaginary threat of Sharia law "crap."

He's dead right, but it immediately disqualifies him in the eyes of the crazies who believe in crap.
Oh, and I don't want to be Pedantic Literary Guy here, but Kristol also completely misunderstands the poem he's quoting when he says that the last line ("what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?") "sounds like Chris Christie."
I wonder how Gov. Christie would feel about the comparison, because the "rough beast" Yeats speaks of in his vision is kind of scary. He's a "shape with lion body and the head of a man, gaze blank and pitiless as the sun." Not the kind of candidate you'd want to have a beer with, for sure.
Nevertheless, it seems that Christie is the latest in a series of desperate attempts by the wingnuts and teahadists to find someone who'll save the party from nominating Mitt Romney, a heretic who's actually worked with Democrats and gotten some good things done for his state, like a reasonable health care plan.
But the far right doesn't want compromises with Democrats. They don't want a health care plan for anyone who's not them. They're willing to burn the country down in the name of "taking it back." So they fall for grifters like Palin (perpetually fundraising, perpetually coy about whether she's running) or nutters like Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann.
But then the flavor of the month says something so mind-bogglingly stupid ("The HPV vaccine caused a woman's child to become mentally retarded!") that even the mainstream media can't ignore it, and down they go. So Rick Perry becomes the new ABM (Anyone But Mitt), until he falls apart in the debate, then shows that he's actually got some positions that make sense, such as not punishing children who grew up in America because they were brought here by illegal immigrant parents.
But sanity enrages the goon squads, that noisy cohort the party refuses to acknowledge, yet somehow manages to get invited to every GOP debate. You know, the ones that cheer for executions, shout "yeah!" when someone asks if you should just let an uninsured man die, and boo soldiers in Iraq because they're gay. For those people, Rick Perry's greatest sin is that he's not crazy enough. So the perpetually angry and disgruntled right moves on. Now they turn their eyes to Christie, who's not even running.
Yeah, good luck with that.

Palindrones: Looping Between the Anger and the Denial Stages

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Gov. Sarah Palin's resignation "press conference" on July 3 was a bizarre speech, even for Caribou Barbie.
Oh, I knew to expect the fractured syntax, which is pretty much a given every time Palin takes the stage. The woman makes George W. Bush sound like Cicero.
Nor should the whiny assertions of victimhood come as any surprise. Chunks of self-pity, slathered in resentment sauce, are a familiar dish to those who've ever perused the menu at the Wingnut Cafe.
What is unusual is to hear a right-winger actually admit that she can't stand the heat, so she's fleeing the kitchen.
I'm just happy we don't have someone as chief executive or VP who'll walk off the job in a huff if some obscure blogger or late-night talk show host makes a tasteless joke about a member of their family, especially after some of the "witticisms" directed at Obama's wife and daughters.
One far-right blogger wondered which Obama daughter would the first, and I quote, "to get knocked up and have an abortion in the White House," while a rabidly pro-Clinton (later rabidly pro-McCain) site featured Michelle's picture altered to look like a character from "Planet of the Apes."
And yet, somehow, Obama's still doing the job people elected him to do. By contrast, if Palin were president, al-Qaeda wouldn't need bombs or bullets to decapitate the government; they'd only need a bootlegged copy of Photoshop.
Palin's hard-core supporters, of course, cackled with glee, as they do at pretty much anything St. Sarah does. "Look! She's running away! We've really got the liberals where we want 'em now!" One might think this sort of slavish devotion would be odd behavior for people who like to sneer at any Obama supporter as if they were some kind of cultist, but consistency of thought has never been a hallmark of the American Right.
For true, Baghdad Bob-level denial, however, your go-to guy is always William Kristol.
In last week's Washington Post, Smilin' Bill takes an entire column to trot out one of the tiredest and most dimwitted of wingnut cliches in his paean to the Resigning Woman. That being: If you think Sarah Palin is a fool, or at least that she's done a very foolish thing, then you must be terrified of her.
According to Kristol, his "friends in the mainstream media and the Republican establishment tend not only to dislike and disdain Palin, they also want to bury her chances now as a presidential possibility. What are they so scared of?"
Ow! The stupid! It buuuurns!
But wait, there's more. Kristol claims that the "panic" among these unnamed parties "suggests real worry that if she does, she might pull off an upset. Why else the vehement assertions that she's clearly made a terrible mistake? Why else the categorical insistence that her political career is finished? Aren't they all protesting too much?"
Gee, I don't know, Bill. Maybe people are asserting vehemently that your GOP fantasy pinup girl has clearly made a terrible mistake because she's clearly made a terrible mistake? Maybe there's a categorical insistence that her political career is finished because people really believe her political career is finished?
You've got to admit, abruptly walking out on the job Alaskans elected her to less than a year after almost singlehandedly crashing and burning a presidential campaign isn't exactly an obvious springboard to bigger and better things.
I'd say that Kristol's crazy-like-a-fox take on Palin's failin' is overthinking, but I don't think there's a way to put the word "thinking" and "Kristol" in the same sentence without collapsing with hysterical laughter.
(Nope, I couldn't do it.)
Here's a news flash, Mr. K: people don't laugh at Sarah Palin because they're afraid. They laugh at her because she's absurd. Tina Fey didn't concoct her dead-on impersonation of the Wasilla Hillbilly because she's scared of her; she did it because with her winks, fake folksiness, aggressive ignorance, and outrageous, bat-crazy assertions about her foreign policy experience, Palin is the most easily mocked politician in America right now.
But I hope Kristol's right about one thing: I hope Sarah Palin does run for president in 2012, using the same divisive, hateful, "I'm a real American and you're terrorist-loving scum" tactics that proved oh-so-effective last time. She seems incapable of learning from the past, so I'd enjoy seeing her repeat it.