Crazy Like on Fox

Is the GOP fragmenting before our eyes, or is this a process by which they eventually unite behind, say, former Utah Governor John Huntsman?

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is Republican Partying like it's 1995, doing his best to appeal to the red meat, most cranky and insulting individuals in his party, but is also rejecting the Paul Ryan Medicare elimination plan. Which John Boehner now claims he's resurrecting with a new "message"...after his House GOP freshmen begged Presdent Obama in a three-page letter to let them be forgiven for having voted for the wildly unpopular Ryan budget plan.

Former Governor Mitt Romney is losing the support of GOP elites, who are finally realizing what we've known all along: unelectable due to his Massachusetts health care reform success (yes, that's how crazy his party is) as well as his appearance of either phoniness or the aloofness of wealth.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is the next Mitt Romney and the pre-John Huntsman, except that he's acting like Hamlet (or Mario Cuomo) about making a decision, possibly due to issues with his wife, which is also (x3) an issue for Newt Gingrich.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) is now running and telling everyone he would not have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act on property rights grounds (generally libertarian utopianism) and compares both Social Security and Medicare to slavery. Yes, comparing the institution of forced servitude and genocide with making sure we don't have poverty-stricken grandmothers like we did before these programs were enacted.

Donald Trump...is a contingency over at NBC, which would probably like to replace him in his own series anyway.

And former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's "heart says no" (as in I just bought a really huge new house and love doing my TV show platform to pay for it). I assumed that as he bought the multi-million dollar home and has been putting weight back on again (business meals?) he wasn't running.

My father used to say that you have to be slightly crazy to want to be President. It's that kind of job. Does this make Mike Huckabee now the most sane of the top tier viable Republican Presidential candidates?

And what does that say about the 2011 Republican Party?

Nuts

Willard Romney quit his campaign today and in his kiss-off speech, rather than speaking in any statesmanlike manner as others have, he sounded like a dangerous suck-up lunatic loser:

Romney: ”If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Well, now that they're no longer serving by trying to get him elected, does this finally mean that his sons will enlist in the War he so rabidly supports?

Sadly, with both Mitt and Rudy now out of the race, we're clean out of Republican candidates endorsed by Netterainment. With McCain out in front and Huckabee building a case for VP, we're down to the only two GOP candidates that ever gave me pause that they might win.

Guess who already polls better against McCain.

Streamroller Building

Two new polls out for New Hampshire, Barack up either 38%-26% over Hillary, or 37%-27%. Somewhere in the range of a 14-point jump in forty-eight hours. Nice.

His strategy has bested hers, plain and simple. Her machine is showing the first pulls at the seams as donors go what the hell and her campaign head, pollster Mark Penn (has worked for, oh yeah, Blackwater) looks like the central failure. Letting Obama take the mantle of change while they played experience. Misunderestimating the emerging civic-minded Millenial Generation that Obama nailed through Facebook.

Good stuff from the New Hampshire debate tonight, much better format and better with just four great candidates.

Here's how Obama beats her on change.

Here's a great longer segment, where Clinton makes her best argument for actually having accomplished things in office, and John Edwards runs interference for Barack Obama.

Here's just a bunch of great Edwards clips from the debate -- really seemed the most rested and happy of all of them. Makes you wish he hadn't been a VP candidate under Kerry four years ago, might mean it can't happen now.

I can't bring myself to link to anything from the Republican debate. It's just not about anything the majority of Americans are thinking about. Ron Paul makes the most sense on foreign policy. Huckabee is the only other candidate who listens to Paul respectfully. Romney takes hits from all. McCain throws in a little old guy straight talk on pharmaceutical companies. Rudy again uses the word "perverted" with regard to radical Muslim thought.

You want real?

Here's Obama's barber shop.

Eve

Finally, the Primary season begins on Thursday with the Iowa Caucus, where (for Dems) second choices matter.

The press seems to be that big turnout = Obama win, what with other candidates reportedly leaning his way, and Hillary's surrogates already lowering expectations. Edwards is the wild card, with what they call "a strong ground game" and tireless campaigning.

It's weird and unfair, but between the two closing talking head ads, Obama comes across as wayyyy cooler and more pleasing to have on your TV every day for four years than Hillary.

Meanwhile the GOP is Comedy Central, with Romney having spent millions to end up making excuses that he might come in second, although scab candidate Mike Huckabee maybe shot himself in the foot this week by attempting to go negative without getting labelled as such.

To top it off, Fred Thompson's campaign is looking to end by Sunday, and a desperate Rudy Giuliani has made the most frightening campaign ad of all time...to the point of absolutely shameless self-parody (and shameless exploitation of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, her body not even cold a week). It's his Hail Mary pass, and what a way to go out.

All that being said, ours still beats the electoral process in, say, some other country.

Fracture

A valued reader emailed the following to me, which I'm delighted to have permission to reprint in full:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_12/012766.php

I love Huckabee! He's throwing down the gaunlet to the republiscum bigtime. LordyLordyLordy, FINALLY!!!!!

"They were more than happy for us to come to the rallies and stand in lines for hours to cheer on the candidates, appreciated us putting up the yard signs, going out and putting out the cards on peoples doors and making phone calls to the phone banks and — really appreciated all of our votes. But when they got elected, behind closed doors, they would laugh at us and speak with scorn and derision that we were, as one article I think once said "the easily led." So there's been almost this sort of, it's okay if you guys get a seat on the bus, but don't ever think about telling us where the bus is going to go."

Finally, the complete horseshit that is the Republican party is going to face the music. Dimwit evangelicals finally realize that 28 yrs of votes has gotten them nothing, and dimwit libertarians finally realize that 28 years of votes have gotten them bigger gov't, more gov't intrustion, and criminalization of just about everything.

This is shaping up as a perfect storm for the republican corporate crime syndicate -- there's a real possibility that they might split into three pieces in the next 12 months. (The only one who can reunite them, alas, is Hillary.)

As the old saying goes, "Amen to all that."

Crocodile Mitt

Having previous made a disgrace of himself and his family by equating his five able-bodied sons working to get him elected President to selfless young American soldiers dying in a war he fervently supports, Mitt Romney has once again open that can of bullshit.

Mitt's been getting misty-eyed in Iowa recalling a run-in with the coffin of a dead soldier in Boston's Logan Airport:

"The soldiers that I was with stood at attention and saluted," Romney told employees at Insight Technology Inc., a company that makes infrared optical equipment for U.S. troops. "And I put my hand on my heart, and tears begin to well in your eyes, as you can imagine in a circumstance like that. I have five boys of my own. I imagined what it would be like to lose a son in a situation like that."

But you won't. In fact, Mitt, the really telling part of your little emotimoment is when you say, "This is a nation which is united."

No, Mitt, not when the rich aren't vested in the very war their class seeks to profit from with the lives of other fellow citizens, without any risk of their own. This is John Edwards' Two Americas. Because only a fool or a liar doesn't recognize exactly how un-united we Americans are these days, save those of us united against the current leadership and it's enabling followers.

So with Giuliani sidelining himself with his infidelity and avarice, that leaves Mitt as the resident liar. The GOP Presidential race appears to be coming down to Romney, Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Ron Paul.

Huckabee has the smooth screen presence of a practiced pastor, starting to feel a little snake oily, like here in his confident, Christianist commercial for...Christmas. With emphasis on the Christ.

I give Mike credit for taking the old school, religious, non-materialistic position on Christmas, the one the wingers and their pundits claim we need re-instilled but please don't stop the shopping. On the other hand, this is a seriously chilling signal that Huckabee cannot for a second be trusted to keep church out of state. Is that the message he really wanted to send? And will any more perceptive Christians turn against him for using Christmas as a political tool?

Then there's the old folks club, today featuring John McCain and his latest endorsee, Sen. Joe Lieberdouche. The odious Joe, it turns out, just wanted to be relevant. See, it turns out he didn't endorse a Democratic candidate for President because none of them wanted him.

That leave Ron Paul, who's at about 6% in the national polls, but has a base so fired up by his combination of anti-War Constitutionalism and outright Libertarianism, that he's raising the most impressive stack of money amongst the GOP field. This isn't like Romney propping up his campaign with his own or his family's money. This isn't buying the nomination.

But expect that with such a war chest and such committed supporters, Ron can trail in the early states and still play through to the end.

I was on the Santa Monica Promenade yesterday when a parade of Ron Paul supporters, led by Revolution-drag fife & drum, walked right up the middle, passing out literature, the otherwise normal looking individuals both making me proud to live in a democracy, and scaring me with their with their focus and organization.

It was a signal, once again, that the Ron Paul candidacy could turn out to be the big story of the GOP campaign.

And even if not now, the network going into place will have four more years to position themselves to win it all.

Religiously yours

I'm starting to think America is in the midst of more than just a religious battle. The massive contradictions of mass religious belief has led America to a full-blown nervous breakdown.

Witness Colorado over this past weekend:

Three people were shot to death and six were wounded in Colorado on Sunday in two church-related shootings in the U.S. Christian heartland...

The second one has 7,000 people in the megachurch when the shooting happened. A security guild finished off the gunman. The first shooting happened at a Christian missionary training center seventy miles away, with the gunman escaping, so it's reasonable to bet that the incidents might be related and rather chilling to suspect they might not.

It seemed about time for the violence to reach the megachurches, situated as they are in the heartland where gun control is weakest. So many people in one place. Centers of community, therefore natural gravitation points.

Oddly enough, the first incident was sparked by the refusal to house a stranger, which some might consider an un-Christian act:

In the Arvada shooting, a young man came to the door of the Youth With a Mission dormitory asking for a place to stay, the group said in a statement.

When he was told he could not be accommodated there, he pulled out a handgun and opened fire. Two youth staffers were killed and two were wounded. They had been up late cleaning up after a Christmas party.

The mission is an international and interdenominational Christian organization that trains young people to work as missionaries.

As to the site of the second attack:

The New Life Church was founded 20 years ago by pastor Ted Haggard who resigned in disgrace a year ago after admitting to sexually immoral conduct following a friendship with a male prostitute.

Now, I don't want to imply that the churches brought these terrors upon themselves. Maybe a more pious person might believe that those very infractions, the inhospitality and the homosexuality, marked these organizations for God's wrath or Satan's messenger. Joseph and Mary didn't open up on all those innkeepers who told them sorry, all rooms already booked. It just seems that religion is on the front burner, poised to boil over.

The early Presidential race, particularly the GOP preach-off, has put it there. You've got Mitt Romney asking to be included among like-thinking Jesus worshippers, and Mike Huckabee acting like his God is finally giving him props.

Romney's speech prompted lefty Dem Lawrence O'Donnell to go nuclear on the Mormon religion -- something he helps portray on HBO's Big Love -- this morning on the McLaughlin Group:

This was the worst political speech of my lifetime. Because this man stood there and said to you "this is the faith of my fathers." And you, and none of these commentators who liked this speech realized that the faith of his fathers is a racist faith. As of 1978 it was an officially racist faith, and for political convenience in 1978 it switched. And it said "OK, black people can be in this church." He believes, if he believes the faith of his fathers, that black people are black because in heaven they turned away from God, in this demented, Scientology-like notion of what was going on in heaven before the creation of the earth.

Whether or not you agree with O'Donnell or his own righteous fervor, it's a wild clip, as each other other commentators (Buchanan, Crowley, Clift, John himself) descend into anarchic contention, professional pundits suddenly made incredibly uncomfortable and not having the time to settle back into their usual bullshit. O'Donnell's the bomb thrower and everyone allows themselves to get blown up, over and over until saved by sponsor.

And whether or not you agree with O'Donnell, the big issue he's igniting is whether recent religions are actually synthetic monsters, not worthy of being spoken of in the same breath as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, uh, Islam. Is Scientology a religion, or a collection of extremely misguided believers in kooky myths built by con men? Is Mormonism the same, just with a century and a half headstart?

Do any of their faithful have a place in the highest seat of American political power?

Is that even safe?

Even Conservative pundit George F. Will has a problem with Mike Huckabee, per this generally derogatory bunch on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. (Cokie Roberts: "You're getting back to the same problem, the Republicans don't have a candidate, that's your problem!") And Huckabee is looking a little less lovable after revelations of the past week, a rapist/murderer released for political reasons, and sticking to his 1992 position on quarantining AIDS sufferers.

The Catholic Church, which had it's breakdown over the past decade, is still recovering, awkwardly.

If you take O'Donnell's assault on the founding and beliefs of relatively recently minted religions to their natural philosophical conclusion, all religions are built on unprovable supernatural beliefs, hence all strict believers are too nuts to be President.

This is why the Romneys, Huckabees and, yes, Bushes of the world should be embracing the separation of church & state. Imagine that a Mormon hater gets in, uses Cheney-era precedents to wiretap Romney, rendition his sorry ass, and torture him with impunity. It's good to be king, but nobody gets to be king forever.

And if you take the questions O'Donnell sparks all the way down the line, one might ask, is religion itself the Root of All Evil?

Or, as George Carlin so hilariously reveals, religion is...well...why is God so bad with money?

Mugshots

Looks like there's a bit of a tizz in the legendary New York Public Library regarding some Photoshopped prints being displayed:

Each black-and-white digital print is a mug shot-style diptych in which a member of the Bush administration appears in profile and face forward, holding a police identification sign and the date on which he or she made a statement of questionable veracity relating to Iraq.

A video accompanying the prints allows you to hear an actual recording through headphones as you view each speaker’s fake mug shot reproduced on screen. President Bush announces the discovery of Saddam Hussein’s effort to purchase uranium in Africa. Dick Cheney says, “Nobody has produced a single shred of evidence that there’s anything wrong or inappropriate here,” presumably a reference to Halliburton.

Sometimes we forget that they are criminals. But then there are reminders like this by civic-minded artists. In fact, the criminality is on the new daily. Like what TPM calls our Bamboozeler-in-Chief, pretending that the NIE report revealing that Iran is not a nuclear threat does not matter. That nothing has changed. Or his henchmen illegally deleting over 10 million incriminating emails. Or his closest aides in Contempt of Congress.

What about the new crop of GOP pretenders to da throne? They have problems with illegal immigrant workers as well as setting other criminals free for political reasons, allowing them to kill again:

While on the campaign trail, Huckabee has claimed that he supported the 1999 release of Wayne Dumond because, at the time, he had no good reason to believe that the man represented a further threat to the public. Thanks to Huckabee's intervention, conducted in concert with a right-wing tabloid campaign on Dumond's behalf, Dumond was let out of prison 25 years before his sentence would have ended.

"There's nothing any of us could ever do," Huckabee said Sunday on CNN when asked to reflect on the horrific outcome caused by the prisoner's release. "None of us could've predicted what [Dumond] could've done when he got out."

But the confidential files obtained by the Huffington Post show that Huckabee was provided letters from several women who had been sexually assaulted by Dumond and who indeed predicted that he would rape again - and perhaps murder - if released.

The political reason for the release: rabid Arkansas GOP hatred of Bill Clinton:

The case for Dumond's innocence was championed in Arkansas by Jay Cole, a Baptist minister and radio host who was a close friend of the Huckabee family. It also became a cause for New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy, who repeatedly argued for Dumond's release, calling his conviction "a travesty of justice." On Sept. 21, 1999, Dunleavy wrote a column headlined "Clinton's Biggest Crime - Left Innocent Man In Jail For 14 Years":

"Dumond, now 52, was given conditional parole yesterday in Arkansas after having being sentenced to 50 years in jail for the rape of Clinton's cousin," Dunleavy wrote. "That rape never happened."

A subsequent Dunleavy column quoted Huckabee saying: "There is grave doubt to the circumstances of this reported crime."

The result:

After Dumond's release from prison in September 1999, he moved to Smithville, Missouri, where he raped and suffocated to death a 39-year-old woman named Carol Sue Shields. Dumond was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison for that rape and murder.

But Dumond's arrest for those crimes in June 2001 came too late for 23-year-old Sara Andrasek of Platte County, Missouri. Dumond allegedly raped and murdered her just one day before his arrest for raping and murdering Shields. Prior to the attack, Andrasek and her husband had learned that she was pregnant with their first child.

Bye-bye, Rev. Mike?

Ames Results

The GOP hold a "straw poll" in Iowa every Presidential election cycle, a vote entirely meaningless in determining the Primary winner, meaningful only in publicity terms, from whence to maybe solidify a position, get a good idea to drop out, or make a name for oneself.

The results are in from the Ames Iowa Straw Poll, this first test vote, and while Mitt Romney spent a load of time and money to win it, he may have hurt his cause by only winning with 31% of the vote. This is significant because other frontrunners Giuliani and McCain chose to conserve their resources and not participate, ditto crypto-candidate Fred Thompson.

To put it in perspective, back in 1999 George Bush won it with 31% as well, against very credible candidates. From Liz Mair:

In other words, Mitt Romney, playing a field uncrowded by other presidential heavyweights, only managed to pull off the same percentage as Bush did in 1999, when Bush was competing against the likes of Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Dole (who were treated as credible candidates at that time-- Patrick Ruffini notes that Steve Forbes threw millions at the straw poll in 1999, something Huckabee clearly did not do this year, and something that Romney apparently did). So, while a win for Mitt is a win, him taking 31% isn't really that much of a big deal. In some ways, when he was competing against a number of go-nowhere candidates, you might have expected him to do better.

So who actually scored at this circus-like event? The guy I originally bet on to win the nomination (before his fundraising efforts came up shallow), Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. While I disagree with Huckabee on many issues (i.e. evolution), and can't stand when he goes with canned material like recently on Colbert, he's actually got a pulse, per this video. And he plays highly credible electric bass.

Per my post yesterday, Newt can get in and maybe even win the nomination. But, in my view, Huckabee would be the only threat in a general election. And maybe this meaningless poll is his start.