Is Obama living Iron Lady's legacy?

President Barack Obama slipped the controversial "chained CPI" formula for cutting Social Security cost-of-living increases into his 2014 budget, angering liberal Democrats in the Senate, the House, and progressive organizations.

By Emily Theroux
When Barack Obama introduced his 2014 budget today, one controversial item made it look more like the kind of austerity plan that might have been devised by formidable British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher than a fiscal proposal by a “stateside” Democratic president.

That’s because, for the first time, a Democratic president has dared to propose cutting increases in Social Security benefits — the linchpin of the American social safety net. His inclusion in the budget of “$230 billion in savings from using a chained measure of inflation for cost-of-living adjustments” broke a campaign promise not to cut benefits for current or near-term retirees. The move infuriated progressives, who delivered 2 million petition signatures to the White House yesterday, demanding that the item be expunged.

An Obama adviser termed the infamous “chained CPI” budget item a “goodwill gesture” to Republicans. The president himself, according to Politico, viewed it as serving “a tactical purpose” by proving he’s not afraid to “flout party orthodoxy.” Liberal organizations like MoveOn, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the National Organization for Women, and the Campaign for America’s Future called it a betrayal.

I call using the left (by goading them into a heated public confrontation purely to score points with his opposition) unmitigated, full-throttle political posturing.

New formula would cost retirees $112 billion

Robert Reich

President George W. Bush, barnstorming the country to hawk his much-maligned Social Security privatization plan in 2005, got zero, zilch, nada for his trouble. No one was buying Dubya’s scheme to turn the popular entitlement program into a high-stakes casino.

Obama might have paid more heed to the lessons of recent history before attempting to foist chained CPI on the American electorate. This ill-advised modification of the formula for calculating the consumer price index — a “market basket” of goods and services on which annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) to Social Security are based — would result in what the AARP has understated as “not a small benefit change” for the oldest and most vulnerable retirees, as well as for military veterans.

As economist Robert Reich observed in a videotape last week introducing an anti-CCPI petition later submitted to the president:

“The idea is that when prices go up, most people substitute lower-cost items. So a true calculation of the cost of living should take account of this substitution effect. This makes no sense for seniors, because they spend 20 to 40 percent of their incomes on health care, and they can’t substitute lower-cost alternatives.”

AARP estimates that chained CPI will cost Social Security beneficiaries $112 billion and veterans $25 billion during the next decade. Because the formula compounds benefit reductions over time, it will result in an annual benefit that is “roughly $1,000 (in 2012 dollars) lower by the time a beneficiary reaches age 85,” according to AARP’s Josh Rosenblum. “Eventually, … beneficiaries would lose a month’s worth of benefits every year.”

For disabled veterans, the reduction is even more severe. "Permanently disabled veterans who started receiving disability benefits at age 30 would see their benefits cut by ... $3,200 a year at age 65," wrote AARP's David Certner, who met with Andrew Biggs of the conservative American Enterprise Institute and discussed CCPI's tax ramifications. As Biggs noted:

"You want to have (Congress) do something. You don't want to have them do something really crappy, though. ... On the Social Security side, it's not good policy. On the tax side, it's not good. At some point, you say it's not good policy."

CCPI 'an idea not befitting a Democratic president'

"Mr. President, the chained CPI is a cut to Social Security benefits that would hurt seniors. It's an idea not befitting a Democratic president. If you want to reform Social Security, make the wealthy pay their fair share by lifting the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes."

That was the message delivered by former Secretary of Labor Reich’s petition. On this side of the pond, liberal economists like Reich and  Paul Krugman agree with advocacy groups for retirees and veterans that CCPI is a raw deal for Social Security recipients.

Margaret Thatcher

Yet Thatcher, who died Monday at age 87, would no doubt have applauded Obama's heartless formula. (Thatcher, Reich tweeted, "gave Ronald Reagan the courage of his misguided conviction.") She didn't cotton to coddling "the less fortunate," whom she regarded, as many on the extreme right do, as moochers, leeches, malingerers, and reprobates. Baroness Thatcher would have been right at home with Mitt Romney's opinion of the "47 percent" of Americans who, in his flawed estimation, "believe that government has a responsibility to care for them."

Mme. Thatcher once opined:

"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand, ‘I have a problem; it is the government’s job to cope with it,’ or ‘I have a problem; I will go and get a grant to cope with it’; ‘I am homeless, the government must house me!’ … They are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing. There are individual men and women, and there are families."

Even tax-averse millionaires hate chained CPI
Chained CPI has a single dubious claim to fame: virtually everyone loathes it, from wealthy investors to veterans, from aged “pensioners,” as the Baroness would have called them, to hordes of boomers on the brink of retirement.

Everyone, of course, except Thatcherites “dismissing Britons in need as parasites and wastrels” (in the words of progressive blogger Richard Eskow), like-minded congressional Republicans  — and, now, our own inconstant leader. The Barack Obama of hope and change has transformed himself into someone that his once-loyal liberal base no longer recognizes.

Our peerless 2008 presidential nominee, whom we hurried to endow with shimmering waves of potentiality and purpose, turned out to be a mirage. Like the Nobel committee did a year later, we pinned on Candidate Obama our most quixotic aspirations, as the seemingly interminable nightmare of the Bush/Cheney oligarchy neared its bitter denouement.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker/AP photo

But our champion inevitably let us down. President Obama didn’t prosecute the torture-mongers for war crimes or the Wall Street banksters for the financial crisis. He didn’t slip on that pair of comfortable shoes and march with union members protesting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s legislative assault on collective bargaining rights. He didn’t advocate single-payer health insurance, fight institutional racism, or battle poverty. He didn’t swoop in to advance gay civil rights or create a pathway to citizenship for immigrants. He didn’t close Guantanamo or reject indefinite detention of prisoners or halt drone warfare, but instead took their precepts to lengths no one could have envisioned.

Despite an impressive record of policy achievements, Barack Obama is not now, nor has he likely ever been, the transformative president he vowed he would become if we worked our collective asses off to put him in office. Home safe after his successful reelection; dissed and thwarted by GOP obstructionists so many times, you’d think he swear off any notion of a “grand bargain,” he’s still trying to burnish his bipartisan cred. The far right may brand him a socialist, but Obama governs, as many on the left complain, like a predictable, center-right Clintonian Democrat or a moderate Republican — not the progressive icon we so badly needed him to be.

The 44th president talks a pretty good game, but he slow-jams the news.

Congressional firebrand Sanders takes action

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont/AP photo

I’m not alone in uttering this heresy. The din of disillusionment has been almost deafening in the blogosphere and on Twitter for the past week. If Congress cuts Social Security by implementing this callous adjustment — a deliberate and unnecessary “sacrifice” that, as Reich points out, the Republicans haven’t even asked for —– Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as well as members of progressive groups, have suggested there may be 2014 primary challenges to Democratic members of Congress who vote for it. As for the House, Representatives Alan Grayson and Mark Takano collected the signatures of 29 progressives who vowed to vote against any bill that includes Social Security benefit cuts.

Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida

Did Obama at least mean well, before ascending to the tantalizing pinnacle of power? We’ll have to leave that question to history. No one can imagine, before the fact, what it’s going to be like up there, in that rarefied stratum that’s only been attained by 44 Americans in the brief span of almost 237 years.

In the words of the troubadour, it’s lonely at the top, and — as I’m sure the Iron Lady could have told us if her lips weren’t sealed against anyone’s ears but Saint Ronnie’s —– as magnetic as the polar north.

Obama's varied American 'family'

Why did Mitt Romney lose the 2012 election he was so certain he could win by appealing almost entirely to angry, aging white men?

America, it turns out, isn’t nearly as uniformly white as its white residents have long imagined it to be. Women, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians (as well as young voters of both genders and all ethnic groups) had a much larger say in this election than the Romney campaign calculated. Barack Obama’s “noisy, messy, complicated” democracy of 300 million people bears what he called, in his brilliant victory speech, “a mark of our liberty” in the very contentiousness that so polarizes us.

“The story of this election is that the Republican Party has not kept up with the changing face of America,” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd proclaimed just after the nation’s first black president won reelection.

The improving economy played a part in Obama’s stunning victory, as did the success in Midwestern states of his auto bailout, his foreign-policy experience, and his quick, effective, and compassionate response to Hurricane Sandy. Romney’s consistently high negative ratings (over everything from his obvious mendacity and persistent flip-flopping to his unsavory “vulture capitalist” career, obsessive secrecy about both his wealth and his taxes, refusal to provide any substantive details about the policies he might pursue as president, and repellent, robotic personality) certainly made voters less likely to trust him or view him as “presidential.”

“But make no mistake,” Todd opined. “What happened last night was a demographic time bomb that had been ticking and that blew up in GOP faces.” The white portion of the electorate dropped to 72 percent, Todd noted, and the president won only 39 percent of that vote. Among other demographic groups, however, Obama rode the crest of an unstoppable wave of change.

• Obama carried 93 percent of black voters  (now 13 percent of the electorate).

• Obama won 71 percent of Latinos (10 percent) nationwide; about 70 percent of the Latino vote in Colorado and Nevada; and 60 percent in Florida, despite the large number of Cuban-American Republicans in the state’s population.

• The president won 73 percent of Asians (3 percent of the electorate).

• Despite predictions that youth turnout would be depressed because young voters were believed to have become disillusioned with the president’s policies, voters in the 18-29 demographic represented 19 percent of the 2012 electorate (up from 18 percent in 2008); Obama won 60 percent of that age group.

The American people won this election, fair and square. Despite a GOP strategy of blatant racism and xenophobia, a broad-based voter suppression machine that put Jim Crow to shame, the “caging” of targeted groups from voter rolls, actual election fraud committed by a shady voter-registration firm used repeatedly (and under different names) by the Republican National Committee and various GOP candidates (including Romney) since the 2004 election, and a coordinated voter intimidation effort in swing states, Democrats and left-leaning independents toughed out enough attempts to thwart their votes that they were able to outnumber Republicans in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, and, thus far, Florida — every other battleground state but Indiana and North Carolina.

There simply weren’t enough white voters remaining in the electorate to dominate the vote in the nine swing states. A working coalition of single women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and young voters collaborated to defeat Romney and Republican Senate candidates in state after state.

Twenty years ago, said Fox’s Bill O’Reilly in a desperate attempt to save face, “an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney would have trounced Obama.” As bigoted and uncharitable as O’Reilly was about the black, Latino, and female voters who “feel that the economic system is stacked against them” and “feel they are entitled to things,” O’Reilly had a point.

Romney won 61 percent of the white vote last night, said Todd. The last candidate to win with that high a percentage of the white vote was George H.W. Bush in 1988. Since then, the share of the white vote in the general electorate has shrunk, and 61 percent of a shrinking slice of the electoral pie no longer puts GOP candidates in the White House.

“The white establishment is now the minority,” O’Reilly lamented. “The demographics of the country have changed. It’s not a traditional America any more.”

An anonymous comment following the Daily Beast’s story about Mitt Romney’s “bust” of a “victory party” elaborated on the point:

“The most telling aspect of Romney’s election night gathering is (that) just about every single person in the audience was white. The GOP is going to have to learn that they will not win if they do not court our racial minorities, and to court them means to give up on their racial bias. It’s politics, people; you are supposed to represent your constituency, and if you do not do that, you are going to continue to fail.”

This country’s been way too white for way too long. It was engendered as a melting pot, but an unequal one. Now, with the reelection of America’s first black president, the path that leads away from a government of, by, and for old, wealthy white men is well on its way to being leveled. This societal upheaval has inspired a great, ragged cry of protest from the privileged few who are being inexorably replaced — not by revolution or the “reparations” they’ve imagined being expected to pay, but by the births of “non-white” children (whose “right to life” remains the near-universal obsession of the very people who most resist immigration, integration, and assimilation).

I call them “world children.” The urban block I live on is a virtual “United Nations” of racial and ethnic backgrounds. My neighbors’ son, Sir William, 7, is French-Canadian and African-American. Becky, 8, who adores my dog, Zoe, and dresses her up in costumes, has a Mexican mother, Remedios, and a Honduran father, Jesus. Amanda, 10, is Afro-Caribbean and Dominican. MacKenzie, 6, and Natalia, 4, are Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee, and black. Jovaughan, 9, and his little sisters, are Haitian; while Elijah, 5, and Joelle, 2, have an African-American father and an Irish mother.

My baby grandaughter, Dulcinea,1, is Italian, Scotch-Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Palestinian. My husband’s two grown children, Kailey, 26, and Alexander, 23, are French-Canadian, Irish, and Jewish.
These children are the future of an electorate that, by 2040, will cross the invisible threshhold from “majority white” to “majority other.” No longer “illegal” or “alien,” their varied and blended ethnicities may one day succeed in eradicating the scourge of racism from a country where everyone, after all, is originally from somewhere else.

'Which Mitt' would handle FEMA?

By Emily Theroux

Ssshh! A moment of silence, please.  Turn down that racket from incessant campaign ads and warring TV pundits (if you didn’t already lose your cable service to a gargantuan maple tree toppled by Hurricane Sandy, as I did Monday afternoon).

You wouldn’t want to miss the sound of one hand clapping, a paradox that developed when poor Mittens had no one to play partisan patty-cake with. His good buddy from New Jersey abandoned the Tea Party games that MittWit had talked him into playing. The frivolity got too preposterous and infantile for Mitt’s BFF to stomach, so he ran off to join the grown-ups who had finally reached across the aisle to begin solving the country’s problems.

In the eerie hush of an early Halloween twilight — without lights, heat, and background noise in the millions of households without power — you could almost hear Mitt Romney fuming, all the way from Ohio, over New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s treachery.


Obama & Christie: emerging ‘power couple’

NJ Gov. Chris Christie & President Barack Obama after the storm.

The news teemed with post-disaster anecdotes about “Sandy’s political odd couple,” Christie and his unlikely ally President Barack Obama, who worked in tandem to coordinate the relief effort and flew together in Marine One to tour parts of New Jersey devastated when the hurricane made landfall there. And just look who’s green with “envy” now, absorbing the spectacle of political polar opposites patting each other on the back, a freaking mutual admiration society!

“Seeing him with Chris Christie is tearing me apart,” satirist Andy Borowitz imagined a steamed Mittster venting. (The nerve of Mitt’s own convention keynote speaker, defecting to the enemy camp just one week before Election Day to call a truce in electoral hostilities over a freaking windstorm!)


Storm of the century sidelines Mitt from headlines

Mitt Romney

“Frankenstorm” is over, leaving a grim tally of casualties and destruction in its wake: 94 reported dead thus far, millions without power, countless families homeless, 9 out of 23 subway lines still closed in New York City, and as much as $50 billion in property damage, extra living expenses, and lost business. The president admirably rose to the challenge to oversee disaster relief endeavors by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  Christie, doing likewise, even signed an executive order “rescheduling Halloween” because the streets in his state weren’t yet safe for trick-or-treaters.

Marooned in my silent living room sans Internet access, I could still easily discern from my cell phone connection that Mitt Romney didn’t have a lot to say about how he would handle disaster relief if he were in the president’s coveted shoes.

Granted, Mitt’s got several tough acts to follow. Even though Obama was bashed for reacting “prematurely” to the hurricane threat by stunningly inept Katrina-era FEMA head Michael Brown (of  “Heckuva Job, Brownie” fame), the president smoothly coordinated a truly bipartisan storm response with fellow executives like Christie, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

The GOP  contender, as New Yorker columnist John Cassidy opined, “has a FEMA problem and a Chris Christie problem.” The “unemployed” multimillionaire challenger finds himself cast in the unenviable position of odd man out in a venue tailor-made for incumbents. Obama shines by simply doing his job (and gleans a 77 percent approval rating among likely voters on his overall response to the storm). Romney, on the other hand, has no official tasks to perform and doesn’t feign empathy very well. He’s limited to phony photo ops that reveal him to be the cynical, calculating, and purely political android that he really is.

Romney accepts Walmart "donations." (Photo: BuzzFeed)

In the aftermath of the superstorm that flooded city streets, swamped the New York City subway system, and flattened homes, businesses, amusement parks, and boardwalks along the Jersey Shore, the sidelined Romney campaign staged a bogus “storm relief event” offering faux “donations” of granola bars, diapers, and canned goods purchased by staffers from an Ohio Walmart for $5,000. People who showed up for what was originally billed as a “victory rally” were encouraged to pick up Walmart merchandise and hand it to Romney in front of the cameras. When skeptical reporters began questioning him about whether he would ax FEMA, as he had suggested during a 2011 primary debate, Mitt clammed up and ignored them as if they were a bothersome swarm of gnats.

2010 Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle (Photo: AP)

Like Tea Party whack job Sharron Angle, who ran for Harry Reid’s Nevada Senate seat in 2010, Mitt traded his mirthless, chiseled mug for a Halloween mask just days before the 2012 election, dodging questions he didn’t want to answer by pretending the people asking them were as ephemeral as  “Invisible Obama.”



Mitt vetoed flood prevention bill in Massachusetts

After watching Barack Obama “palling around” for days with Christie, Romney was finally goaded by his campaign staff to respond to the anti-FEMA rap that his own past positions had pinned on him. The craftily constructed switcheroo issued by the Romney campaign late Halloween night read as follows:

“I believe that FEMA plays a key role in working with states and localities to prepare for and respond to natural disasters. As president, I will ensure FEMA has the funding it needs to fulfill its mission, while directing maximum resources to the first responders who work tirelessly to help those in need, because states and localities are in the best position to get aid to the individuals and communities affected by natural disasters.”

While insisting that Romney doesn’t intend to eliminate or defund FEMA outright, this “Mitticism” relegates the federal agency to “play(ing) a key role” in working with states and localities. Like every other vague policy proposal that the GOP’s Obfuscator-in-Chief has released to date, this statement is as flimsy and mutable as Mitt Romney’s word. He could change it tomorrow, next month, or next year.

If he wins next week’s election, what would Romney really do? His record as governor of Massachusetts offers an ominous prologue. In 2004, after Peabody’s downtown had been repeatedly flooded by heavy spring rains, Romney vetoed a $5.7 million flood control bill. His longtime spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, claimed that Romney had asked Peabody officials for more information but “none was forthcoming” — a charge that local residents vehemently disputed.

Downtown Peabody, Mass., flooded by heavy rains in 2004

Two years later, the area flooded again. “Massachusetts is sitting on millions in unspent emergency funds from Hurricane Katrina and more than $1 billion in cash reserves, yet Romney has failed to even respond to the Lowell delegation’s requests to discuss additional aid for victims,” the “conservative-leaning” Lowell Sun commented.

“When you’re dealing with a candidate as sketchy and shifty as Romney, his brief record as an elected leader is perhaps the most telling guide you have,” wrote Paul Constant in Seattle’s Slog blog. “Romney has demonstrated an inability to prepare for the future, and then an inability to face the consequences of his actions when the future arrives.”


Privatized disaster relief: profits before victims
The day after Hurricane Sandy decimated the East Coast, The New York Times published an editorial titled, “A Big Storm Requires Big Government.” Without FEMA’s “war room,” the National Response Coordination Center, the Times argued, relief efforts for a multistate emergency would be virtually impossible to coordinate. When Romney expressed his position du jour at the September 2011 New Hampshire GOP primary debate, he went beyond saying that disaster management should be “returned to the states. … If you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.”

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush

Romney the “vulture capitalist” has given us no reason to doubt that he really does believe privatization of many government functions would be optimal. Privatizing disaster relief, however, would be, well — “disastrous.” If Romney wins the election, private disaster response companies (including one headed by Dubya’s brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush) are waiting in the wings to profit from disaster victims’ misery. Stephen D. Foster Jr. of the blog Addicting Info calls this playbook “a recipe for fraud,” as for-profit response companies could hold both disaster areas and individual victims hostage until their asking price is met. Foster cites a frightening recent example:

“Remember the home in Tennessee a couple years ago that was allowed to burn down by the local for-profit firehouse because the residents failed to pay the fee? Well, you can bet that same scenario will play out across the country and on a more sickening scale.”

Christie doesn’t ‘give a damn’ about Election Day
Pundits have speculated about whether Christie is simply sucking up to Obama because he won’t be able to run for president as the GOP candidate in 2016 if Romney wins in 2012. Democrats, however, aren’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, so most are taking Christie at his word.

That word, as usual, is devastatingly blunt when you’re on the receiving end of it, as Fox flunky Steve Doocy found out after wondering aloud when Romney “was going to get some of the same benefits from the hurricane with a photo op in disaster-stricken New Jersey towns,” in the words of the blog Raw Story’s David Edwards. “[W]e hear that perhaps Mr. Romney may do some storm-related events. Is there any possibility that Gov. Romney may go to New Jersey to tour some of the damage with you?”
Christie minced no words in his response:

“I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested. I’ve got a job to do here in New Jersey that’s much bigger than presidential politics and I could [sic] care less about any of that stuff. … I’ve got 2.4 million people out of power, I’ve got devastation on the shore, I’ve got floods in the northern part of my state. If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.”

That nonpartisan approach could be just the ticket for an Election Day rejection of the mendacious, divisive politics embodied by the Mitt Romney wing of the Republican Party.

Debate II: ‘Mittitus Interrupt-us’

Above, 'the picture of the night,' according to the website I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists. 'I think this picture sums it up,' wrote blogger Icarus. 'Romney interrupting Obama in the debate again, with no respect or deference for the president. This picture is a perfect caricature of Romney during his entire campaign. 10k bet?'

By Emily Theroux

After watching the second Obama/Romney debate, a town-hall brawl staged at Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island, I felt as if I’d disappeared down Alice in Wonderland‘s rabbit hole into the “sea of tears” and come up gasping for air in Orwell’s 1984.

Nothing the Republican standard-bearer said made sense.  Up was down. Black was white. Truth and lies were indistinct, mutable, virtually interchangeable, because that’s how Mitt likes it. Chaos and dissension permit him to dominate the conversation, manipulate the viewers’ perceptions of his rival, and falsely cast himself as upholder of righteousness, captain of industry, foreign policy virtuoso, and champion of the middle class — which bamboozles the unwary as long as the debate moderator buckles like a doormat and Romney’s opponent remains loath to call a flip-flop a dirty, deliberate lie.

Moderator Candy Crowley (Pool/AFP/Getty Images)

This time, however, no one — with the possible exception of the 82 absurdly indecisive and largely uninformed town-hall questioners — was taking Mitt the Impaler’s smug, derisive nonsense lying down.
The moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN, fought back valiantly against Mitt’s dizzying displays of entitlement, pique, condescension, disrespect, and refusal to observe the rules of the debate.

President Obama showed up this time firing on all cylinders — the actual 2008 campaigner, come back to life. While Willard “Myth” Romney kept coming at him — throwing hissy-fits of petulance when Crowley or Obama had the temerity to stand up to him, ominously stalking the stage while alternately seething and smirking, hurling contempt, and flinging invective — it was clear that Mitt wasn’t quite sure what hit him.
Obama was present, engaged, wry, witty, assertive, even aggressive when necessary, without relying on Joe Biden’s fallback posture during last week’s vice-presidential debate with Paul “Lyin’ ” Ryan — laughing in his opponent’s face every time he lied. From the moment when Obama first said, “Candy, what Governor Romney said just isn’t true,” I knew it was only a matter of time before Mitt the Wazzock (a name which shall live in infamy Across the Pond) lost his loosely corralled marbles and launched into the primary-tested “Mitt the Twit” arrogant-bully persona taken viral by tweeting Londoners last summer.

The Mittster, by contrast, was defensive and offensive in turn, rattled, domineering, snappish, pouty, and a complete churl. My relatives in South Carolina have an expression for such boorish behavior: Mitt acted, as my mother used to say, “like something on a stick.”

Fox ‘questioned the questions’ undecided voters asked
Not that you could tell Obama trounced Romney from the wingnut drivel that inevitably followed the debate. The fools on Faux News were spinning Romney’s embarrassing performance so furiously that some actually concluded that the sorest of sore losers won the debate!
You could have set your alarm clock by Fox’s — and, I’m afraid, CNN’s — escalating paint-by-numbers idiocy.

Brit Hume, Fox News

• Color #1: Brit Hume, the Fox “straight news guy,” observed, “I thought Mitt Romney was the same Mitt Romney we saw in Denver two weeks ago” (no mention of the cold, unalterable fact that Mittens was lying like a used-car salesman and insolently hectoring the sitting President of the United States — nor that he was devastated by the president’s comebacks to his preposterous lies, and Crowley’s “fact-checking” of Romney’s mischaracterizations of Obama’s reaction to the Sept. 11 attack on the American consulate in Libya). Hume did conclude, however, that Obama ” will probably be declared the winner of this, on most cards.”

John King, CNN

• Color #2: John King of CNN fell into the predictable mainstream trap of trying so hard to keep from being accused of “liberal media bias” that such journalists end up creating a “false equivalency” between the comparatively rational Democrats and the extremist “insurgent outlier party” that the GOP has devolved into. “I think Gov. Romney did a very good job prosecuting against the incumbent’s record,” King proclaimed. (That assessment becomes meaningless when you’ve delved into Romney’s symptomatic pattern of deceipt long enough to realize that what appears to the uninitiated as “a very good job” is merely a very thorough pack of lies.)

Sean Hannity, Fox News

• Color #3: Sean Hannity raved about Romney’s debate “win,” calling Romney’s performance “the most-devastating indictment of the Obama economy that we’ve seen. CBS snap poll 65-34 Romney tonight.” (This was not what other journalists said about the CBS poll. The Washington Post said Obama won 37 percent to 30 percent, while 33 percent described it as a tie; they also reported that a “snap CNN/ORC poll” said Obama won, 47 percent to 39 percent. Other mainstream sources agreed.) Hannity also called Romney’s failure to make the case that Obama “didn’t call the attack in Libya an act of terrorism” (when he clearly did) the debate’s “best moment.”

Romney retaliates with imperious, hit-and-run debating style

“Romney came across as a kind of irritating know-it-all who doesn’t operate well when he’s challenged,” said Jonathan Alter to Chris Matthews, in what had to be the understatement of the evening.

At one point, Romney charged Obama with a 14 percent drop in oil production and a 9 percent reduction in gas production this year on federal land — because, he said, the president halved the number of licenses and permits for drilling on federal lands and in federal waters. “This has not been Mr. Oil or Mr. Gas or Mr. Coal,” he snarked.

Then, after Obama called Mitt’s attack “not true,” the Republican started in on Obama with a manic, rapid-fire inquisition that astonished viewers with its sheer impertinence, as well as by Mitt’s absolute refusal to let Obama finish a response or get a word in edgewise.

“So how much did you cut ‘em by?” (Obama, again: “It’s not true.”) “By how much did you cut ‘em by, then? (Obama: “Governor, we’ve actually produced more oil on —”)

“No-no,” Mitt snapped, as if shushing an impudent child or dismissing an “illegal” Mexican gardener. “How much have you cut on licenses and permits on federal land and federal waters?” (Obama: “Governor Romney, here is what we did. There are were a bunch of oil companies —”) “No, I had a — I had a — I had a question —” (Obama: “No, you — no, you — you — you want —”) “— and the question was, how much did you cut them by?” (Obama: “— you want me to answer a question, I’m —”) “How much did you cut them by?” (Obama: “I’m happy to answer the question.”) “All right, and it is?”

OMG, MittWit! I nearly cried out. Did you remember to take your meds today?!!?!

Obama actually managed to articulate a paragraph about refusing to let oil companies squat for 20 to 30 years without drilling on public lands. Then more crossfire ensued over whether oil production was up (Obama) or down (Romney) on federal land. Finally, Mitt bashed Obama with this doozy: “I don’t think anyone believes that you’re a person who’s going to be pushing for oil and gas and coal. You’ll get your chance in a moment,” the challenger informed the incumbent, “because I’m still speaking.”(Obama: “Well, Governor, if — if you’re asking me a question, I’m going to answer it.”) “My — and the answer is I don’t believe people think that’s the case, because I — I’m — that wasn’t a question.” (Obama: “Okay. All right.”) “That was a statement.”

Photo by Getty Images

Un-freaking-believable! Mitt Romney was just as testy, disdainful, and disrespectful toward President Obama as he was to Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum — “swatting him away,” as Chris Matthews put it. Noblesse, in Romney’s case, does not oblige. (“Excuse me; I’m still speaking … I’m not finished … Anderson? Anderson? … Let me complete!”) The baby of George and Lenore Romney’s family, MittForBrains can be insufferably whiny and demanding when he doesn’t immediately get his way.
“Candy, I’m used to being interrupted,” joked Barack Obama, Leader of the Free World.

And dissed. A “white pride” voter was allowed to attend a Romney campaign event over the weekend wearing a navy-blue T-shirt emblazoned with the following legend: “Put the White Back in the White House.”

Sadly, ever since Obama’s first State of the Union address, when the execrable South Carolina congressman, Joe Wilson, shouted out, “You lie!” to the first black president of the United States, such staggering effrontery has precipitously eclipsed the audacity of hope.

Debate results indisputable: Mitt slept in doghouse last night
After the fireworks ended with Obama’s “47 percent” grand finale, Ann Romney’s subdued behavior was telling: No congratulatory kiss and hug for hubby.

By morning, fortunately, cooler heads than the talking ones on Fox News prevailed. Although they weren’t effusive in their praise, the Morning Joe team on MSNBC gave Barack Obama some credit for winning the debate — while ascribing to Mitt Romney a heap of blame for losing it.

Joe Scarborough

Joe Scarborough, who called the debate “Romney’s missed opportunity,” made it clear that he didn’t like Mitt’s autocratic and dismissive debate posture (although Scarborough’s condescension toward Candy Crowley was almost as irksome as Romney’s poised-to-go-viral comment about the “binders full of women” that he falsely claimed resulted from his own efforts to recruit “qualified women candidates” to hold cabinet positions and agency posts in Massachusetts).

“You don’t run over a female moderator,” said Scarborough. “And you don’t run over the president of the United States.” The general consensus, he added, dictated “that you treat the president with deference.”
About Mitt Romney, Morning Joe sidekick Mike Barnicle opined, “He behaved as if he were a CEO and this was a hostile takeover.”

Let’s hope he doesn’t see dollar signs in American voters’ eyes and decide, once he wins the election, to ship all of our jobs to China.

Mittastrophe! The real class warfare

 On May 17, a videotape was surreptitiously recorded of Romney addressing a $150-a-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. Mother Jones acquired the tape months later and released it in its entirety several days after breaking the story. To hear the full speech, click on the links to part 1 and part 2. MJ also published a complete transcript.

By Emily Theroux

“Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,  I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me. … Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”

— Matthew 25: 41-45, The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats

* * *

Malingerers, moochers, freeloaders … the ugly, racially charged words roll in with the wholesome manure-reek of Mitt Romney’s imagined heartland, where the bounteous harvest is in, “the 53 percent” pay their taxes, and true patriots don’t take nothin’ from nobody. Unemployed bottom-feeders who don’t want to work for a living — that’s how the “severe conservatives” Mitt emulates have characterized the “least of these,” the poor, sick, hungry, and downtrodden whom Christ taught his followers to care for.

Almost half the American populace “are dependent upon government,” Mitt tells an audience of fellow zillionaires. The objects of his derision are folks who, he asserts, “believe they are victims” or “believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing” and other perks of deliberate parasitism on the taxpayers’ dime.

If you voted for Barack Obama for president in the 2008 election, that’s how “Willard of Oz”, as Chris Matthews crowned him, perceives you.

____________________________________________

"You name it," Mad Dog Mitt said about how much largesse he thinks professional victims expect the government to give them in the form of free handouts. His fundraiser rant, delivered to 150 truly "entitled" people, dismissed out-of-hand some 150 million people whom he had already decided to cut loose — purportedly because they would never vote for him, but in reality, because he despises their weakness, their "lack of incentive," their abject neediness. 

____________________________________________

During the months after May 17, when a videotape was surreptitiously recorded of Romney addressing a $150-a-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla., bits and pieces of it surfaced on YouTube without attracting much attention. Then James Carter IV, former President Jimmy Carter’s activist grandson, gave a copy to investigative reporter David Corn, who posted a salient snippet of it on the website of Mother Jones magazine. (Several days later, the full speech was posted in two parts — part 1 and part 2 — as well as a complete transcript.)

Viewers were astonished to hear the GOP candidate speaking in a straightforward but glib and cynical tone of voice — a total departure from the practiced, artificial wheedle he employs on camera or the sanctimonious platitudes he dishes out at campaign rallies. You may notice that he sounds slicker (and, if possible, even more calculating and ruthless) than you previously imagined. After listening for a moment, you realize that this new, no-nonsense tone is something you’ve never heard before: the unaccustomed sound of Mitt Romney telling the truth — to people he doesn’t look down on, about people he does.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what, all right? There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That it’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. … And they will vote for this president no matter what. These are people who pay no income tax. My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Mitt thinks his job, I repeat, is “not to worry about those people.” (Shades of Lady Ann, Rafalca the Austrian warmblood, and #YouPeople!) Willard Romney had written off 47 percent of the public — a stupendous number of people to hold in utter contempt — with the sole purpose of pandering to a handful of rich donors. The gobsmacking “tale of the tape” went viral within hours, ricocheting around cyberspace. Two days out, the one-minute video had been viewed 7.1 million times, the second-highest number of YouTube hits ever on a political story. (Katie Couric’s 2008 interview of Sarah Palin topped the list, with 24.4 million views.)

While far-right radio talkers didn’t wait for a cue to defend the standard-bearer they had once conditionally accepted, reviews of Romney’s “performance” by mainstream pols and pundits were withering:

• “A sneering plutocrat” (Jonathan Chait, New York magazine)
• “Thurston Howell Romney” (David Brooks, The New York Times)
•  “Arrogant and stupid remarks” (Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard)
• “Not big, not brave, not thoughtfully tackling the issues … An intervention is in order” (Peggy Noonan, WSJ)
• “An increasing problem with him being able to connect with voters” (Mark McKinnon, GOP strategist)
• “The worst presidential-candidate gaffe since Gerald Ford announced in 1976 that ‘there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe’” (David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter)
• “You don’t win an election by disparaging just about half of the electorate” (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, on Fox News)
• “Inaccurate, insensitive, almost callous in (his) disregard for the American people ” (Ed Rendell, former governor of Pennsylvania)
• “You trashed the very people who are your margin of success” (Chris Matthews, MSNBC)
• “A magnetic moral compass that has no true north” (Alex Wagner, MSNBC)
• “That’s not the way I view the world. … (B)eing on public assistance is not a spot that anyone wants to be in.” (Scott Brown, GOP senator from Massachusetts, who “grew up in tough circumstances”)
• “(T)he vast majority of those who rely on government are not in that situation because they want to be” (Linda McMahon, Connecticut Senate candidate)
• “We’re losing” (Jim Dyke, veteran GOP strategist)
• “This is what it looks like for the wheels to come off” (Rachel Maddow, MSNBC pundit, Rhodes scholar, national treasure)
• “Mitt Romney is not the face of Mormonism” (Dr. Gregory Prince, Mormon historian and author)
• “I’d say Romney’s performance will help to determine most of the close Senate contests” (Larry Sabato, University of Virginia political scientist)
• “My feeling is maybe you haven’t gotten around a lot” (Barack Obama, President, USA)

 Mitt writes off 47% ‘who don’t pay taxes.’ Does he?
Un-freaking-believable! Lord Willard Romney’s blowing off half the nation because of the GOP’s misleading “new orthodoxy,” popular during the Republican primary season, which suggests that 47 percent of Americans “don’t pay any taxes” or don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes. The way Romney explained it to what Eddie Murphy once termed a “roomful of rich dummies,” I don’t think even Mitt knew what he meant.

The now-infamous 47 percent statistic (which Mitt mangled into his own inaccurate Obama vote percentage) actually refers to a taxpayer analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, showing that 46.4 percent of American households did not pay federal income tax in 2011. “The households in question consist primarily of the retired, the poor and low-income families with children,” two New York Times reporters explained. “Moreover, they do pay taxes, if not income taxes: Just 8 percent of households do not pay payroll or federal income taxes, discounting the elderly.”

“Many people don’t pay income taxes because they’re so poor they don’t make enough money to be able to pay income taxes,” former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat, told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. “But they pay payroll taxes, they pay state taxes, they pay excise taxes. This man apparently feels that if you’re not a part of his social class or you don’t have his economic status, that somehow you’re a parasite.”

Another reason that a larger percentage of people pay less in taxes is that Republican fiscal policies have provided tax incentives to low-income workers — including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the child tax credit, which enable low earners to offset a portion of their income tax obligation with exemptions similar to the mortgage interest and property tax deductions that benefit middle-class workers.

Erick Erickson's "We Are the 53%" Tumblr

Since Obama’s inauguration, however, GOP legislators have become so resentful that they’ve turned against their own policies, including the EITC, originally passed by Gerald Ford and later expanded by Ronald Reagan. This deduction was intended to help “lift people out of poverty” and provide them with an incentive to keep working at tough jobs that paid very little. But when President Obama’s stimulus bill and other tax legislation expanded EITC benefits and extended relief from the “marriage penalty,” Tea Partiers viewed it as providing lazy “moochers” with unfair advantages. (The right-wing “We Are the 53 Percent” movement was founded to express such sentiments, after the Occupy Wall Street movement caught on nationwide.)

A final question, after slogging through the videotape: Isn’t Mitt himself one of the 47 percent he dismisses, by his own definition? He doesn’t have a job. (Translation from Republican: He’s a lazy POS.) He pays neither income tax nor payroll tax. (In other words, he’s the paragon of “victimology.”) And because he refuses to release his tax returns, 100 percent of Americans remain in the dark about whether he really pays the measly 15 percent capital gains tax on his investment “income” (already the biggest scam in the annals of tax avoidance — and yet the wannabe Veepster, Paul Ryan, wants to eliminate this loophole altogether!).

As it turns out, CNN Money published a story about this very subject after the “Mittastrophe” tape went viral. “The Tax Policy Center estimates that 4,000 households with incomes over $1 million ended up with zero federal income tax liability in 2011,” Jeanne Sahadi wrote. “Another 14,000 made between $500,000 and $1 million.” Mitt Romney admitted to his Boca Raton audience that he is one of them.
Release the tax returns!!!


Colbert: ‘Fancy talk for a black guy’s coming for your stuff’
The Romney campaign has apparently done some tape-sleuthing of its own, digging up another golden oldie: a grainy recording of then-Illinois State Senator Obama, speaking at a 1998 Loyola University conference on Chicago city government. Obama had the misfortune to have uttered the word “redistribution,” albeit in a completely different context from that of the current GOP “Romneyhood” feeding frenzy over the designs of the poor on rich people’s’ “rightful” lucre.

 

It didn’t matter that Obama was really talking about “fostering marketplace competition” and business innovation, not rampaging serfs pillaging the fortunes of their feudal lords. Mitt’s team pounced anyway, diced and spliced the tape, and excerpted the sliver they wanted from the part might have resonated with the great unwashed 47 percent. Bingo! You stay classy, Romney-O!)

Will the scum-suckers, leeches, and other assorted parasites that Lord Romney so viciously disdained, when surrounded by his “peerage,” buy the new, improved “Moderate Mitt” who came out last night as the candidate of “the 100 percent”? No, if you ask me. Will the wingnut blowhards breaketh wind? Too early to call.

I say let’s Occupy Romneyworld and throw him to the crocodiles circling the sorry carcass of his candidacy in the moat below the castle walls.

Diplomacy D-Day: What would Willard do?

Mitt Romney defends his criticism of President Obama, after four diplomats were killed during protests in Benghazi, Libya. Photo by Charles Dharapak/AP.

By Emily Theroux

With only eight weeks to go before the 2012 election, tensions are ramping up in Rightwingistan. Mitt Romney, sadly, got no bounce from his disastrous convention, while President Obama soared with a 12-point spike in the polls among independents. And even more humiliating for Mitt, Fox News released the poll results.

By September 11th, conservatives were wringing their hands. Nothing they could think of seemed to be selling this bill of goods to any undecided working-class voters who weren’t dyed-in-the-wool racists. (One white Virginian, who voted for Bush twice and firmly believes Obama is a Muslim, told a reporter that she wouldn’t vote for Romney because he didn’t know “everyday people” like her and would only help the wealthy. Surprisingly, Obama will get her vote. “At least he wasn’t brought up filthy rich,” she observed.)

Terry Jones

Rush Limbaugh was desperately goading Mitt to “get tough” with Obama, and Mitt’s pal Bibi Netanyahu was saber-rattling about Iran, suspiciously close to the November election. A show of “force” was needed on the world stage to bring independent stragglers into the GOP fold. When Florida’s infamous, Koran-burning pastor, Terry Jones, proclaimed this year’s September 11 anniversary “International Judge Muhammad Day,” and talked up the YouTube debut of a crude, anti-Muslim video, Romney saw his chance.

When the video appeared in an Arabic translation, outraged Muslims tuned in to horrifying, “cartoonish” depictions of their beloved Prophet Muhammad as “a child of uncertain parentage, a buffoon, a womanizer, a homosexual, a child molester, and a greedy, bloodthirsty thug,” wrote David D. Kirkpatrick  in The New York Times.

Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens

News of the blasphemy spread quickly online.  Furious protestors ran riot in  Libya, attacking the American consulate and killing four American diplomats, including the widely respected U.S. ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens. It was the first time since 1979 that such a high-ranking diplomat had been murdered in the line of duty. In Egypt, protestors scaled the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and burned the American flag.

Mighty Mitt, hearing that a statement condemning “religious incitement” had been issued by the embassy in Cairo,  rushed in to seize the day. Before Stevens’ body had even been identified or his family notified, Mitt  issued an ill-advised proclamation of his own (despite the fact that he had vowed to refrain from politicking on the September 11 anniversary):

“I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

Never mind that the embassy’s statement was issued six hours before the protests began. Obama apologized for America again! was Mitt’s take on it, and he was sticking to it. Obama loves Muslims. (Good line; reinforces the canard that Obama is a Muslim.) How dare “the Obama regime” target the “good-guy” American filmmakers instead of the evil Muslim protestors?

Then Mitt just sat back and waited for the fireworks to explode.

Faced with mounting criticism, Romney dug in
This morning, after the negative reviews of his rash reaction started flooding in, Mitt stepped to the microphone again and, instead of making amends, shocked the political establishment by doubling down:

“When our grounds are being attacked and being breached, the first response should be outrage. Apology for America’s values will never be the right course. We express immediately when we feel that the president and his administration have done something which is inconsistent with the principles of America.”

“A terrible course for America is to stand in apology for American values,” Mitt later told a reporter. (What does that even mean? Whose values – his? The entire substance of his attack on Obama was based on a deliberate, compound falsehood. The embassy didn’t issue an apology; their statement was an attempt to stave off the violence they saw coming well before the attacks; and Obama had no direct involvement in what they said.)

Did Mitt Romney jump the gun in issuing statements “that were laced with politics,” asked NBC’s Peter Alexander?

“I don’t think we ever hesitate when we see something which is a violation of our principles,” replied a testy but self-righteous Mitt.

Romney clearly deplores “bad form” more than he appreciates good substance.

Mitt’s foreign-policy moves ‘craven,’ amateurish, inflammatory
The far right performed as expected. The following snarky Fox tweet was par for the course:

Somebody get some bandages and salve for Obama's press corps - Romney just delivered a thumping.
— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) September 12, 2012

Michelle Malkin, Breitbart.com’s John Nolte, and Dan Calabrese, writing for CainTV, piled on.
But moderate and even conservative members of the mainstream press — and members of the GOP establishment — took a much dimmer view of the way the candidate handled this contretemps.

• “They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit based on the embassy statement and now it’s just completely blown up,’ said a very senior Republican foreign policy hand, who called the statement an ‘utter disaster’ and a ‘Lehman moment’ — a parallel to the moment when John McCain, amid the 2008 financial crisis, failed to come across as a steady leader.” — Ben Smith, BuzzFeed Politics
• “Likely to be seen as one of the most craven and ill-advised tactical moves in this entire campaign” — Mark Halperin, Time magazine
• Romney hasn’t been “doing himself any favors. Sometimes, when really bad things happen, hot things happen — cool words, or no words is the way to go” — Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter
• “Irresponsible”; “a bad mistake” — Chuck Todd, MSNBC
• Romney’s attack “does not stand up to simple chronology” — Jake Tapper, ABC
• Romney’s actions “ham-handed” and “inaccurate” — Ron Fournier, National Journal
• “The Romney campaign’s politicization of the embassy attacks is even worse than I expected” — Blake Hounshell, Foreign Policy
• “Who told Mr. Romney to issue a political broadside against the commander-in-chief the day after a U.S. ambassador was murdered?”  — Joe Scarborough, MSNBC
• “Tolerance of a religion that represents 1/7th of the world’s population is a very wise policy” — former ambassador to NATO  R. Nicholas Burns

“I can’t remember in foreign policy, anything like this,” said Democratic strategist Bob Schrum, who served as a consultant to numerous Democratic campaigns. “This guy seems to have an instinct for saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in politics. He came across as craven and incompetent on national security. This is a disaster; this guy’s just not ready for prime time.”

As progressive radio host Joe Madison said, “This man is stuck on stupid.”

Is Mitt Romney even qualified to be Commander-in-Chief?
My question: Should someone with Romney’s personality flaws even be under consideration for the sensitive job of leading the most challenging foreign policy operation in the world? He lacks both experience and any respectable source of  advice. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t even have what my father, a Dallas native, used to call “kitty brains” — in this case, the instincts to choose a running mate who knows his way around the world. Romney has no habit of critical thinking, no facility for introspection, and no empathy for other people — and there’s not a diplomatic bone in his body. To my mind, he’s not at all “presidential.” All he’s got going for him is a boatload of money — and good hair.

Foreign policy involves a great deal more than braying chauvinistically about “American values,” shooting big guns, and deciding where and when to “put boots on the ground,” as the Bush/Cheney debacle should have taught the people who don’t understand how critical it is that they not vote for a redo of eight years of  sheer folly.

Someone said today that this was Mitt Romney’s three A.M. phone call. Thank God he didn’t have his finger on the nuclear trigger, or Benghazi might have been reduced to radioactive rubble last night.

'Mittstorm': Romney plays race card

By Emily Theroux
"Romney isn't using birthers and bigotry against Obama. It just looks that way," wrote Will Saletan of Slate in "Pin the Tale on the Honky," his send-up of the Mittstorm-of-the-Week: the deplorable birther "joke" that Willard told last Friday during a Michigan campaign stop.

"No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised,"  Mitt snarked, just before Twitter went wild with writers furiously typing "#futureMittjokes."

RNC propagandist-in-chief Reince Priebus has the unenviable job of following in Mitt's footsteps to scrape up whatever fresh heap of elephant dung the candidate deposits on the campaign trail each time he rolls out a new crock of "strategery."

"Have we really gotten to the point where we can't have any levity at all in politics?" Reince wheedled, in defense of the indefensible, on CNN's State of the Union.

His shaky premise didn't hold up to minimal scrutiny. Mitt's descent into the cesspool of birtherism was a calculated effort to turn the page on Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" imbroglio before it engulfed the GOP ticket. How better to put out a conflagration about women's reproductive rights than to change the subject to race, the third rail of American politics?

Asked by Candy Crowley during the same program whether he thought Romney's birther comment was "code" for "appealing to the white vote," Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley of Maryland replied, "Look at the number of Republicans that have signed bills that make it harder to vote. When you have a party that ... makes totally false ads up saying the president is trying to undo welfare reform, I think you're going to see a lot of ... coded messages from the Romney-Ryan campaign that it (are) not in keeping with an America that is ... becoming more diverse."

Priebus tried again the next day on Morning Joe to shrug off Romney's deliberate dog whistle to white Obama haters — targeted by an opportunistic pol who's stooped to humoring bigots in order to reach a new strategic goal. In order to win in November, Romney must now capture at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure that will not only be extremely difficult to attain, but which will only snag Mitt "a slim national majority" if Obama isn't able to improve on his 80 percent share of the 2008 minority vote.

'Tweety' eats Reince's Wheaties
When one of Joe Scarborough's panel members, Chris "Tweety" Matthews, artlessly chomped Reince's Wheaties over Romney's shameless racial pander (camouflaged though it was as a lighthearted comedic "Mitt Moment"), nobody there was laughing. Joe, Mika, Tom Brokaw, and the gang were clearly anxious as hell over how Tweety's outburst might look to viewers and critics. They kept trying to "shush" the garrulous Hardball host or, failing that, to succeed at talking louder than his rant.

Funny that the crowd in Michigan last Friday didn't laugh, either, as Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC pointed out. "They cheered," he observed, as if Mitt had made an important policy pronouncement. They applauded the new knowledge that Romney was willing to go there, to be on record as not merely the Republican who was running for president but the white man who was running to win back the White House for white voters.

Priebus muttered, "Garbage," under his breath at the end of the cable segment — to which Matthews countered, "It's your garbage." A headline for the right-wing site Townhall.com's story about the on-air tiff, however, read, "Chris Matthews Loses It, Calls Reince Priebus Garbage." Neither combatant had characterized the other person as "garbage," but only what he had said.

You can bet that the headline will go viral in the Nutbag-o-sphere, especially since blogger Katie Pavlich's "story" consists of one paragraph referring indignantly to what she believed to be unwarranted criticism of "Mitt Romney's joke about a birth certificate."

How low will Mitt go to attain his 61 percent goal?
Unfortunately, Mitt will find no easy path to cobbling together a national majority, after burning almost every bridge once open to him among black, Latino, and women voters. That, of course, all went up in smoke when he talked trash to the NAACP, excoriated the DREAM Act, and paid lip service to everything from passing a "fetal personhood" bill to shutting down Planned Parenthood. Now, Mitt needs to woo and win three out of every five white voters, and he's not polling anywhere near as well as Obama does (at nearly 60 percent) among the very "college-educated plus" white women who feel the most threatened by the Republican "war on women."

What Romney needs, therefore, is the stereotypical Republican: the white, older, working-class male seething with racial resentment, whom Mitt believes he can rely on to vote against his own economic interests rather than reelect the hated "Obummer" —

• despite the Romney/Ryan plan to raise his taxes so they can even further reduce the taxes of people so rich and greedy, they'll croak before they've even touched their principal, even as he dies a virtual pauper;
• despite their plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system that will start out costing him $6,300 more a year for health care than he pays now, and escalate in each successive year he's still alive;
• despite their plan to turn Medicaid into a block-grant program, so that when his wife needs nursing home care and he can't afford long-term care insurance, he has no way to pay for it.

Everybody knows that the "MittWit" has become so desperate to break away from President Obama in the polls that the only pathway to the presidency he can envision is appealing to the "basest, racist" instincts of the lowest common denominator. White male voters may not be wild about Mitt Romney, but they hate Barack Obama so much more than they love anything — even America — that they're willing to vote for literally anybody else.