Mitt Romney the “vulture capitalist” and the Rest of the Republican Clowns Who Have Presidential Fantasies

Mitt Romney the “vulture capitalist” and the Rest of the Republican Clowns Who Have Presidential Fantasies

“I say third place is a ticket to ride, ladies and gentleman! Hello, South Carolina!” Jon Huntsman shouted to a room of people in New Hampshire. He repeated the ticket-to-ride phrase a few times; assuming that there was some reason for it, beyond a fondness for the Beatles, one has to ask: Who is issuing these tickets, for what conceivable reason, and what is the fare? In Huntsman’s case, the stationmaster may have been relatively easy to spot: his father, whose money might make many things possible, was in the audience. But why spend it; why, at this point, keep going?

When the New Hampshire results came in, with Mitt Romney winning—he got about thirty-nine per cent of the vote—commentators offered two immediate, somewhat contradictory conclusions: the outcome could hardly be better for Romney, and nobody else was leaving the race. Everyone got a ticket to South Carolina. Perhaps New Hampshire’s transformative powers have been exaggerated, and the primary is now so early that most voters aren’t even awake yet. Or Romney’s victories may simply seem less compelling to his opponents than his liabilities; this week has brought a sustained, and arguably belated, interrogation of Romney’s history at Bain Capital. (Alex Koppelman has more on that.) Perhaps none of the not-Romneys want to leave before he’s got the worst of it.

There is a why-not quality to the attacks on Romney, from Newt Gingrich’s involvement in the airing of an anti-Bain documentary to Rick Perry’s characterization of Romney as a “vulture capitalist.” (“That almost sounds like Occupy Wall Street, not someone who is governing the state of Texas as a conservative,” Sean Hannity said to Perry.) One suspects that the “vulture capitalist” line resonates because it serves, for many, not only as a description of Romney’s career but of his personality. It captures something about him—the way he seems to embody the least attractive qualities of both the animal and the automaton. Listening to Romney, one sometimes feels trapped in a science-fiction story that has been written to explore the question of whether robots can lie, or be greedy.

And yet the possibility of a Mitt implosion doesn’t seem like enough of an explanation for why so many improbable candidates are still in it. Most generously, there may be sound, or at least plausible, ideological or tactical reasons to stay: Ron Paul can influence the Party platform, Huntsman can set himself up for 2016. (Last night, Huntsman got seventeen per cent of the vote.) There also seems to be a strong strain of irrationality, though. What we’ve learned after the first caucus and primary is that the casting of actual votes is not enough to dispel the fundamental oddness of this race. It is a contest in which the sitting governor of Texas has become a figure of ridicule, while a Congressman from Texas who has, for years, almost defined the term fringe, has become a collector of delegates: Ron Paul was the second-place finisher in New Hampshire, and a strong one, with about a quarter of the votes. Perry got about one per cent. According to exit polls, Paul was first among young voters.

Is what’s keeping at least some of the candidates in the race—or “the hunt,” as Huntsman called it—not the illusion of victory but the sheer joy of knocking things down? Grown men don’t have as many opportunities as they might to act like toddlers. This isn’t a train going to South Carolina or to anywhere in particular. It’s a set of careening bumper cars. The question, and not just for the Republican Party, is when it becomes a demolition derby. Also, one of the few points to emerge clearly in the debates this past weekend was that the candidates really don’t like each other. (Santorum, who ended up with nine per cent of the vote, would have done well to hide that a little better.) Grudges are great motivators.

Does any of that explain why almost all of the six remaining candidates sounded improbably pleased with how they’d done? Ron Paul was unfakeably gleeful. “I still have to chuckle when they describe you and me as dangerous,” he told his supporters, even though the sound he made was more like a happy cackle. He glowed; for a man who hates government, Paul managed, for a moment, to make politics look fun. And maybe it is fun; there are the balloons to consider, and the cold pizza, and the adulation. (That feeling passed as soon as Santorum began speaking.) Gingrich, with nine per cent of the vote, made politics sound beside the point. Before invoking Thomas Edison, he brought up an eminently practical question the candidates were asked in a debate over the weekend, about whether their vision of no government included doing away with a program that helped low-income people afford heating oil in the winter. He dismissed the premise—Washington thinking. Why not just create whole new energy sources? Gingrich talks as if he’s running for the job of alchemist in chief.

Or maybe Newt is just thinking about money. He wouldn’t be alone. Money, in this case, is a shorthand for a whole set of factors that keep candidates in: the money that they might make more easily for themselves, now that more people know who they are (speech-selling, book-writing, Fox News anchoring); and the money that, thanks to Super PACs, they don’t have to work particularly hard to raise.

Conservatives felt no shame at sending over 4,000 Americans to their deaths based on a pack of lies. Conservatives felt no shame at wrecking the economy. Conservative fell no shame in doing everything they can to keep the economy from recovering just to make Democrats look bad. So why feel shame in staying in a political race - in which PACs play a large role, but conservatives are taking millions from gullible Main Street conservatives - the same gullible rubes who also bought the lies about Iraq, think liberals somehow caused the economic collapse. OK wait a minute, maybe these rubes should keep sending their money to clowns who will just screw them over again. Politics has turned into some kind of sick game in which conservative Americans appear to like being treated like trash.

How Conservative Republican Budget Decisions Are Putting Americans out of Work and Increasing the Risk of a Second Recession

How Conservative Republican Budget Decisions Are Putting Americans out of Work and Increasing the Risk of a Second Recession

Most of the nearly 14 million people across our country who are currently unemployed can blame their situation on the inability of Congress and the White House to sufficiently cushion the economy from the financial crisis that began in 2007. But a growing number of unemployed Americans today are the victims of actions taken by the current Congress aimed deliberately at eliminating jobs.

Even worse, many of these jobs are ones that will have to be performed at some point in the next several years and taxpayers will eventually pay the bill. Delaying the work not only sucks jobs out of the weak economy but also in many instances costs the government more money and over time, and serves to increase rather than decrease the public debt. This report examines some of the job-elimination efforts by the current Congress and the growing impact this is having on individuals, families, and communities around the country.

Saving these jobs does not require us to ignore our country’s long-term deficit problems. While nearly all economists believe we should decisively reduce the amount we are scheduled to borrow over the next decade, a large majority of those same economists believe that the spending cuts and revenue increases necessary to reduce the deficits should be agreed to now but not executed until there is substantial steam in the economic recovery. As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently warned the Joint Economic Committee, it is important to “avoid fiscal actions that could impede the ongoing economic recovery, putting in place a credible plan for reducing future deficits over the longer term does not preclude attending to the implications of fiscal choices for the recovery in the near term.” That is advice that the new majority party in the House of Representatives has been unwilling to take.

To get a clear picture of the efforts by the current Congress to eliminate jobs requires only a visit to the House Appropriations Committee official web site and an examination of a table entitled “FY 2011 CONTINUING RESOLUTION REDUCTIONS.” The table lists a little more than 250 programs that the committee claims to have cut by a total of $45 billion in fiscal year 2011, which ended in October. Not all of the claimed cuts actually reduced either spending or jobs; they claim, for example, to have cut $6 billion from the Decennial Census despite the fact that virtually no one expected a Decennial Census in 2011. But there are significant job losses associated with most of the document. While many discussions of potential job losses from reductions in government spending seem abstract and theoretical, these cuts are clearly resulting in real pink slips being delivered to real people.

Indeed, the magnitude of the job cuts in the budget legislation adopted last spring—as demonstrated by the committee’s listing of 250 spending cuts—is so great that it is difficult to keep track of the human dimension. For that reason, I have focused on three program areas which were singled out by this Congress for particularly deep reductions:

    Federal support for local law enforcement
    Environmental cleanup of nuclear weapons production facilities
    The Federal Buildings Fund of the General Services Administration

Estimates of the number of jobs directly lost by these cuts run upwards to 60,000. The jobs losses that are a direct result of those actions will have a secondary impact on a wide array of businesses ranging from automobile producers to local restaurants and dry cleaning establishments, causing the disappearance of a significant number of additional jobs.

Similar stories could be told about many other budget cuts made in this bill—cuts that resulted in further job losses—but that would require many more pages and exhaust the patience of most readers. All of the various 250 program reductions in the FY 2011 continuing resolution probably eliminated more 370,000 jobs. The three areas selected for discussion in this paper are in my judgment neither the worst cuts made by the committee from a policy standpoint nor the best. But without a doubt they demonstrate the consequences of slashing government spending in a weak economy.

Let's pretend for a moment that conservatives do not hate America and are more loyal to the anti-American movement known as conservatism than they are to the country. If an intelligent alien were to visit earth and look around it would sure look like conservatives hated America and American families.

Republicans Come Out of the Closet, They Just Don't Like Anyone Having Sex, Unless its With Them

Republicans Come Out of the Closet, They Just Don't Like Anyone Having Sex, Unless its With Them

The Republicans ban women from having sex (except with them)

In 2011 America's right wing, and especially the Christian right wing, at last let slip what their problem is with contraception and abortion: it's not squeamishness, morality or a fondness for hanging outside Planned Parenthood clinics toting misspelt placards – they just don't like women having sex. At all. As Amanda Marcotte wrote this week, in 2011 the anti-choice movement "stopped trying so hard to manage mainstream perceptions of themselves as somehow just great lovers of fetal life, and are coming out with their anti-sex agenda". This was borne out in their frankly unhinged attacks on Planned Parenthood, the HPV vaccine, insurance coverage of contraception and, as I discussed last week, the puritanical mood they created that encouraged President Obama to restrict access to Plan B, or the morning-after pill, none of which have much to do with abortion and everything to do with women's temerity to have sex.

Thus, in 2012 the Republicans propose the female anti-sex bill, in which women are expressly forbidden from having sex with anyone other than the occasional lecherous politician who happens to hurl himself, bodily, sweatily, in her lucky, lucky path.

Newt Gingrich becomes the face of the family values party

And here's one Republican politician who definitely doesn't mind women having sex, as long as it's with him. And there does seem to be a surprising number of candidates for the job, considering he looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, and his name is Newt.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure – of meeting him, I mean, of course, of meeting him – here is a crash course in the Republican party's current presidential front runner. This champion of family values cheated on his second wife with a woman 22 years younger than him at precisely the same time he was attempting to impeach Clinton for – and maybe you saw this part coming – cheating on his wife with a woman 22 years younger than him.

Gingrich claimed that his actions stemmed from "how passionately I felt about this country" and, truly, nothing says "patriotism" more clearly than taking your pants off and banging a congressional aide – as long as you're Newt Gingrich, of course. He declined to attend the wedding of his lesbian half-sister, Candace Gingrich-Jones, having referred to gay marriage as "a temporary aberration" and, really, there is no one better placed to sound off on the sanctity of the institution of marriage than Newt Gingrich. Sadly, space prevents me from getting too deeply into other subtleties of Newt's character – that he condemned Freddie Mac for its part in the housing collapse while omitting to mention that he had received $1.6m from them as a consultant, say – but let's just say that he is the perfect summation of all the ticklish and self-serving contradictions one now expects of a party that argues for tax breaks for the rich while pretending to be a friend of the working man. Newt for 2012!

Conservatives constantly betray their small government platform. Name one segment of private or personal life in which conservatives have not tried to get government to regulate, spy on or dictate about. OK, conservatives are sure the individual right for any America to dump their toxic waste on other Americans is in the Constitution. Conservatives are also sure that just about everyone - women, people of color, non-right-wing Christians, people with disabilities and everyone who exercises has fewer rights than they do.

Sometimes Newt Gingrich Believes The U.S. is a Banana Republic and Sometimes He Doesn't

Sometimes Newt Gingrich Believes The U.S. is a Banana Republic and Sometimes He Doesn't

When President Obama earlier this year announced his plan to withdraw the “surge” troops from Afghanistan by the end of next summer, conservatives — seeming to not fully comprehend the idea of chain-of-command — were incredulous that the President did not do exactly what the commanders on the ground advised him to do. But with months to let American laws of civilian control of the military sink in, the idea still doesn’t seem to have caught on. “The commanders on the ground feel that we should bring down our surge troops by December of 2012,” Mitt Romney said in last month’s GOP presidential foreign policy debate criticizing the president’s decision. Romney added, “I stand with the commanders in this regard.”

Newt Gingrich has also attacked Obama for not doing whatever the generals tell him to do. Here’s what the former House speaker said shortly after Obama’s decision was made:

    GINGRICH: I think we are drifting to a very, very dangerous situation. None of the generals recommended the speed of the drawdown the president wants. [...]

    And if you watch what is happening there’s a steady drift from the United States at a time when the president is signaling his desire to get out as fast as he can and potentially faster than the generals think is safe. … You should go to the White House and ask the president why did he overrule all his generals?

Yet there was at least one point in Gingrich’s career in which he understood the chain-of-command, and actively promoted it. In 2006, a number of retired generals called on then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to step down because of poor leadership in the Iraq war. Gingrich defended Rumsfeld in an April, 2006 interview on Fox News, saying, “We have civilian control. … The generals don’t control”:

    WALLACE: Do you agree with any of the criticism from those six retired generals that Secretary Rumsfeld went in with too few troops, went in without a plan, hasn’t been listening to the generals?

    GINGRICH: Look. First of all, Don Rumsfeld listens to generals. He doesn’t obey them. We have civilian control. The president is in charge as commander in chief. The secretary of defense works for the president. The generals advise. The generals don’t control.


So what does Gingrich really believe? Does the president control the military or do the generals control the president? For Newt, it probably depends on which political party the current White House occupant belongs to.

In addition to wondering exactly what Newt believes, patriotic Americans are wondering what if any core values Newt has. He believes in running up big bills at Tiffanys so his third wife can have lots of shiny objects to play with. Newt believes the government should be able to intimidate judges to vote the way pressure groups want them to. Newt believes that America would be better off if it looked like Pottersville in the movie Its a Wonderful Life.

Cartoon Regularly Featured On the right-wing conservative bedbugs at Big Journalism Connected To Nazi-Era Magazine

Conservatives Forgive Newt for the Same Sleazy Behavior for Which They Abandoned Cain

Conservatives Forgive Newt for the Same Sleazy Behavior for Which They Abandoned Cain

Sex is almost always the loser in a scandal. Heaped with scorn, muddied and defiled, it sinks to the basement of our collective imagination—its vain cries, “I am not an animal; I am a human need,” muffled by the gag in its mouth, the bars across the basement door, the blahdeeblahblah of titillation, resentment and ridicule pouring from the TV.

It is difficult amid the most recent clatter, but let’s pretend that Herman Cain was just an ordinary millionaire, selling pizza, gifted with a radioman’s talent for gab, playing every angle to get attention and sell books. Let’s pretend that he was, in fact, Herman Cain before Rick Perry opened his mouth and his brains fell out. No one anticipated that, maybe least of all Cain, whose campaign really was a book tour. While Perry courted Iowa and New Hampshire, while Rick Santorum—who’d been sharing the lower rungs in the polls with Cain— was on his way to visiting every one of Iowa’s counties, Cain visited a Costco in Virginia, signed books and met football fans in Tennessee and Alabama, sold more books in Texas and had nineteen open days on his October schedule.

Bookseller Cain had a couple of sexual harassment settlements in his past, but those were a businessman’s irritant, akin to a fine for toxic waste or any other pesky outgrowth of the regulatory regime that his party has sworn to dismantle. Why should he worry? The payouts were relatively small. He had contractual stipulations of silence and, more important, was welcome in a brotherhood that included Bill O’Reilly. The loofah lothario had panted into a Fox producer’s telephone, disclosing his abrasive fantasies to her secret tape recorder, and then paid handsomely to ditch a harassment suit, but there he was, bullish as ever, ratings strong, presidents honoring him with their time.

The same brotherhood included Newt Gingrich, who infamously laid down terms of divorce to his first wife in a hospital as she recovered from cancer surgery, who left his second wife for another after she was diagnosed with MS, and who married a Congressional aide with whom he’d cavorted while indicting Bill Clinton for lying about sex. At a candidates’ Thanksgiving Family Forum in Des Moines, while Cain confessed to “a series of little failures rather than one big disaster,” Newt resisted the chance for a proper mea culpa but extolled his wonderful life with Callista and urged the audience to pursue happiness in the eighteenth-century manner, seeking “wisdom and virtue, not hedonism and acquisition.” A historian of convenience, he twice exalted eighteenth-century virtue, as if that wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, invoke thoughts of the price the pursuit of happiness had exacted in the slave quarters, but then Gingrich has no more apparent concern for American contradictions than for the contradictions of his own life.

Marriage and God had saved Newt, which is exactly what the forum’s Christian co-sponsors wanted to hear. One of them, an Iowa group called The Family Leader, dedicated to saving the family from the scourges of homosexuality, infidelity, abortion, “quickie divorce” and Sharia law, urged every candidate to sign “The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage and Family.” Neither Cain nor Gingrich signed on (perhaps it was enough that Newt had funneled $150,000 to a campaign in which The Family Leader was prominent, to defeat Iowa Supreme Court justices who’d upheld equal protection for gay couples). The vow’s first item is “personal fidelity to my spouse,” and then it goes on to appropriate the liberals’ language of human rights and resistance to “anti-woman” repression in order to make “faithful heterosexual monogamy” the iron rule.

Now Cain has fallen from grace, and Newt is the Republican front-runner. For Cain, the specter of a sexual life parallel to marriage—forty-three years with Gloria and thirteen concurrent with Ginger White—was the instant disqualifier. For Gingrich, it is enough that he assume the pose of the Chosen: David to Callista’s Bathsheba, with all the cruelties and mendacity resolved by the Almighty’s favor and a pleasing wife: third time’s a charm. “It doesn’t matter what I do,” Newt once said, as his second wife, Marianne, recalled for an article earlier this year in Esquire. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.” Gingrich sees himself in the line of biblical kings; Cain is just… Cain.

It is not ironic that neither man could hew to faithful monogamy; it is pathetic that once again it takes a scandal to reveal human nature as fundamentally nonmonogamous, and once again humans run from its implications—at least those who fashion the retail story lines.

Newt and Cain are great examples of the slippery rationalism of which the conservative mind is capable. Those "values" they claim to have. It turns out they are made of wet clay, easily malleable into whatever shape pleases them on any particular day. I'm sure that conservatives are convinced they have values. Just as many criminals are certain they are innocent even after viewing the video tape of them committing the crime.

Must We Permit the US Military to Detain Americans without Trial?The National Defense Authorisation Act before Congress threatens further erosion of US citizens' civil liberties

Why is Newt Gingrich Winning Over Republicans? Because He is The Kind of Nasty, Corrupt, Idiotic Anti-American That Conservatives Feel Most Comfortable

Why is Newt Gingrich Winning Over Republicans? Because He is The Kind of  Nasty, Corrupt, Idiotic Anti-American That Conservatives Feel Most Comfortable 

It figured that a Republican presidential primary race defined by nothing so much as a taste for cruel and unusual politics would eventually see Newt Gingrich emerge as the cruelest and most unusual contender. Sure, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain might strive for the lowest common denominator. But Gingrich would outdo them in that department, despite heroic feats of insanity, stupidity and sex scandals by the other three. And so he has, emerging as the default choice of a new breed of Republican so extreme it would scare the bejeezus out of Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan.

In the same week that saw the former Speaker of the House become the most serious challenger to Mitt Romney, the Republican very few Republicans seem to like, Gingrich showed his true colors. As part of the ongoing GOP rant against organized labor, he stepped up with a proposal to fire school janitors and replace them with child laborers. Blaming “the core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization” for “crippling” children, Gingrich told a Harvard audience, “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, in child laws, which are truly stupid.” Gingrich did not misspeak. He was serious in suggesting that “most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school.”

Even in a party where shamelessness is now considered a virtue, it’s unsettling that a man who collected $30,000 a month for an hour of counsel to Freddie Mac administrators would attack school janitors, who according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics earn a mean wage of $13.74 an hour, or $28,570 a year. In response to Gingrich, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees said, “The people you want to fire and replace with kids? A lot of them are parents. That job puts a roof over kids’ heads, food on the table, and provides them with healthcare and the chance to get an education. That job is the only thing between a kid and poverty.” But Gingrich has never been bothered by the human costs of right-wing social experimentation. So why start, now that the Grand Old Party seems to be longing for a return to the Gilded Age? Gingrich is betting there’s no such thing as going too far to the right in this race. He may be right; just days after he championed child labor, he secured the endorsement of New Hampshire’s Union Leader, a rigid-right newspaper determined to stop Romney.

Every conservative running for president in the 2012 cycle is an amazing example of the conservative inability to learn from their mistakes. Everyone of them, especially Newt is the rebirth of the George W. Bush administration, only meaner and dumber - if that were possible. These and their ideological comrades across the country came darn close to destroying the economy, now they're saying they should be in charge so they can create jobs. If they were comedians who specialized in satire that would be funny.