by ChrisSick

It’s very early in the morning here, well past my weekly deadline to bring Tactical Animal, first, to my editor, then to all you fine people. There have been significant travails in the Sick Cave of late, and many more yet lay ahead. I won’t bore you with the largely irrelevant details, just suffice to say, I blame Ed Gillespie. As ever.

Moving on, as I’m sure you — patriotic and well-informed citizen that you surely are — are aware, there’s a debate a’coming. This Wednesday, October 3rd the first of three Presidential Debates will be held. The topic — domestic policy. The format — six topics covered in fifteen minute segments, each candidate will have two minutes to respond to the opening question with the balance of the time used to more thoroughly explore the issue. The host — Jim Lehrer, whom my entirely made-up sources assure me will not be moderating the debate while drunk. Quite a bold move on Mr Lehrer’s part.

But! I foolishly promised you observations didn’t I? Yes, I am almost positive I was foolish enough to do that. Well, let’s stop wasting time and get right into it.

Observation the first: The best way to win is to tell every one you’re going to lose.

“First, just as he was in the primaries, we expect Mitt Romney to be a prepared, disciplined and aggressive debater. Governor Pawlenty said Romney ‘is as good as it gets in debating. He is poised, prepared, smart, strategic.’ We expect that Mitt Romney to show up in Denver.”

—David Axelrod, Obama for America press release

“Given President Obama’s natural gifts and extensive seasoning under the bright lights of the debate stage, this is unsurprising. President Obama is a uniquely gifted speaker, and is widely regarded as one of the most talented political communicators in modern history.”

—Beth Meyers, strategy memo to Romney/Ryan surrogates somehow “obtained” by CBS News and National Journal

This is the nicest these campaigns will ever be about their opposition until they’re drafting concession speeches. Because modern political debates aren’t about, say, thoroughly exploring issues in a deeply meaningful way with great respect given to the context and nuance necessary to understand complex political, social, and economic problems. They’re basically about doing your best not to create a photo opportunity like this:

And to that end, it’s all about lowering the bar to the point where the pundits are impressed by your ability to speak in complete sentences, Sarah.

Observation the second: If you haven’t gotten the drift yet, this is all pretty meaningless theater.

The debates are, at bottom, good television – in that they’re entertaining. Granted, that’s mostly because hardcore political junkies generally turn them into drinking games (drink every time Mitt Romney says 100%, drink whenever Obama blames W.). Which is, in large part, why the media hypes them up so much. But as Gallup bluntly put it in the title of an article, “Presidential Debates Rarely Game-Changers.”

“Gallup election polling trends since the advent of televised presidential debates a nearly a half-century ago reveal few instances in which the debates may have had a substantive impact on election outcomes. The two exceptions are 1960 and 2000, both very close elections in which even small changes could have determined who won. In two others — 1976 and 2004 — public preferences moved quite a bit around the debates, but the debates did not appear to alter the likely outcome.”

—Lydia Saad, Gallup Politics, 25 september, 2012

Ms. Saad does go on to say that in close elections — specifically citing Kennedy/Nixon and Bush/Gore — debates may influence the race, because a percentage point or even two might matter. Of course, good political junkies already have a deep and abiding interest in those two races, due to allegations and accusations of fraud in both races, and contentious court battles that ultimately either re-affirmed — as in 1960 — or de facto appointed the President.

The Gallup article also posits that it’s not unlikely this debate could have a significant impact on the election, due to the overall tightness of the race. However, they also note that it’s nearly impossible to tell — given all the factors of any election — how much changes in the polling are due to debate performance. After all, there aren’t many historical polling models for a candidate standing up and saying that he doesn’t even care about 47% of the electorate.

Final observation: The polls are not wrong.

“You may remember a week or two ago I noticed a bounce for the Democrats due to the DNC . Well, good news, that bounce has now evened out.”

—Dick Morris, Twitter update, 25 September, 2012

“I saw Dick Morris on the ‘Hannity’ show last night. He wasn’t just saying Romney still has a chance; he was saying it’s a toss up, which I don’t quite believe. It’s getting a little more ridiculous the more polls that come out. But he was saying, ‘I think Romney will win by four points. I think he’ll win Pennsylvania and would be competitive in Michigan.’ You have to be totally delusional to think that. Is he out of touch with reality? Or is he lying?”

— Nate Silver, Nate Silver: The Polls Aren’t Wrong (Salon.com interview), 29 September, 2012

In my last column I mentioned the emerging talking point from the right that the polling data showing Mitt Romney losing is unreliable because…well, because so many survey respondents insist on self-identifying as Democrats, and pollsters insist on not ignoring them. The talking point has now been forcibly mated with Gallup results showing a sharp decline in trust in the media:

“The press’s job is to stand in the ramparts and protect the liberty and freedom of all of us from a government and from organized governmental power. When they desert those ramparts and decide that they will now become active participants… they have, then, made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy, and, in my opinion, made themselves the enemy of the American people.

— Pat Caddell, speech to Accuracy in Media‘s Conference, Obamanation: A Day of Truth

Note the wild hyperbole, the sky-is-falling dementia, the pounding-the-fist-on-the-table insistence that — at any minute — the Republic will fall apart thanks to the efforts of yellow-bellied “journolists” who carry the President’s water and don’t report how Mitt Romney is really going to steamroll over him come November.

All of which, I’m just guessing, is primarily in service of ensuring the Pat Caddell always has a home — and a paycheck from — Fox News and other reliable right wing media centers that learned long ago there’s more money to be made in telling their audience comforting lies than any disquieting truths.

Caddell contrasts the findings in the Gallup media poll, which shows that only 26% of Republicans have “a great deal/fair amount” of trust in the media with the 58% of Democrats who express the same trust to “prove” that the media is liberally biased. I, on the other hand, would like to suggest an alternate hypothesis: Maybe Democrats aren’t so shit-scared the media is lying to them because they don’t have shrill cunts like Caddell shouting it at them constantly.

Here’s a collection of headlines from just this past week to underscore the point:

1. “Bogus Polls and Declining Dem Registrations,” Powerline Blog
2. “The Media’s Fatal Slide Continues,” Washington Times
3. “Democrat Delusions Driving Pro-Obama Polls,” Washington Examiner
4. “Juiced Media Polls: The Newest Negative Ad,” Big Government
5. “Is This The Most Corrupt Press In History?,” National Review Online

Lest I be accused of being a partisan hack, let me point out: I’ve seen headlines that similarly constructed alternate realities and boggled my head from leftwing journalists — EJ Dionne sticks out in my mind — before, as well. In the last forty-five days before the 2010 midterms, many Democratic talking heads and pundits were clinging to the idea that the coming battering of Democrats in the midterms wasn’t going to happen.

Wanting to stick your head in the sand and ignore an uncomfortable reality isn’t a uniquely partisan emotion. However, one key difference here is that those liberal pundits who were insisting that the Tea Party wouldn’t be able to deliver electoral defeat to Democrats weren’t attacking pollsters as corrupt, or claiming that Fox News was an existential threat to American Democracy, or saying that we were witnessing the end of accuracy or honesty in media.

They weren’t arguing — to their audience, a large segment of the population —that if their candidate(s) lost, it would be because of a willful and deceitful conspiracy that joined “mainstream” media with one political party for the purposes of subverting the will of the electorate.

Because that job was, and apparently still is, fully staffed by a voracious shadow media that makes its living scaring the living shit out of white people, many of whom are heavily armed. Sleep well on that one tonight, friends.

Finally, my big-time, fake-political-pundit-style prediction, just for you:

Next week’s debate?

Won’t matter a bit.

Romney’s bleeding percentage points daily and he’s too risk-averse by nature to try anything major to “shake up the race” and under far too much pressure to execute a risky maneuver well should he be convinced he has to “go for it.” The President will primarily be playing defense, bobbing and weaving around questions about his record while directly challenging Romney to call him a liar to his face, a strategy that he hopes leaves Romney no place to go — forced to either back down from previous attacks, or defend them to both Obama and Lehrer with little substance to them.

It won’t upend the polls, and it won’t be pretty, that’s for damn sure. You’re probably better off just skipping them all together, not bothering to come up with a complicated drinking game, and just heading straight to the bar.

The election is 36 days, 2 hours, and 26 minutes away. After that? I’ll meet you there.

Related Posts
Tactical Animal: On Politicking Cont…
Tactical Animal: On Politicking
Tactical Animal: Regarding The Pain Of Being Right…Or More Reasons Mitt Romney Will Never Be Your President
Tactical Animal: Have You Got Yourself The Belly For It?
Tactical Animal: Sorry Folks, Election’s Over, Donkey Out Front Shoulda Told Ya
Tactical Animal: Politics In The Post-Truth Era
Tactical Animal: Now We’ve Got Ourselves A Race

by ChrisSick

Or a further examination of the alternate realities of Republicans worthy of an episode of Star Trek and the consequences of deciding that it is more important to defeat your opponent than to be victorious.

I’d like to open this column by saying, simply:

You’re welcome.

I’ve spent the last hour, in preparation for writing this piece, reading through The American Spectator, National Review Online, The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner, and The Weekly Standard. These are reliable barometers of conservative opinion, and their contents are not apt to be easily discarded as just the shrill manifestations of the fringe extreme of the right the way, say, Breitbart or FreeRepublic might be.

I just want to make one thing perfectly clear. I do this because I love you.

“Enlightened” by these right-leaning media source, here’s what I found out, among various other things (like how the President loves Muslim terrorists):

1. Nothing has improved under Obama’s first term.
2. Polls are meaningless because they’re only polling Democrats.
3. The media is shamelessly campaigning for Obama.
4. The 2008 Stimulus was a complete and utter failure.

The interesting thing about these articles and these sites is that this is the face of conservatism that you’re likely not seeing if you read reliably liberal sites talking about what conservatives are saying. These are, bluntly, not the sites I tend to link to when I’m trying to mock conservatives or conservatism here in my column.

These are smart, well-educated, and articulate conservatives. I wouldn’t want to have to debate one in a public forum, regardless of how secure I am in my beliefs and values, or even my facts. Because, if nothing else, these people are devastatingly talented rhetoricians. But rhetoric is, primarily, about swaying your audience, not telling the truth.

So when Arthur C. Brooks, writing for National Review Online, talks about the Stimulus failing, he makes a pretty compelling case. He does so, first, by focusing on the well-documented drop in sales of new cars after the end of the Cash for Clunkers program. He ties this into a spirited defense of free-market principles as voiced by the current crop of Republicans, citing a wide-ranging study that links economic freedom — as defined by tax rates and government regulation — with economic prosperity.

All in all, its a pretty compelling argument. There’s one major problem with it: he narrows his focus to one program largely judged to be a failure without taking on the rest of the program, a third of which was focused on tax relief. He also doesn’t bother to engage the fact that most economists believe the Stimulus worked. These facts, of course, are inconvenient to his argument, so in the hope of swaying readers, he ignores them.

I, oddly enough, faced a similar choice tonight while writing this column. I wanted to include the line I’d seen repeated a few times around the rightwing noise machines, that Romney’s 47% comments were actually a winning argument. But when I searched the publications I listed in my first full paragraph, damned if I couldn’t find one.

I was shocked to discover that — near uniformly — the more “respectable” conservative publications had roundly denounced Romney’s comments as both misleading of the economic realities that go into the tax code and who pays and who doesn’t, and both tactically foolish and not indicative of conservative policy as they argue for it.

So I deleted the line and thought it was worth mentioning that I started with a perception that research turned out to be false, so I changed my perception, rather than ignore evidence to the contrary. The links I provided above are a small sampling, but what I saw fairly consistently in them was writers ignoring contrary evidence to a position they clearly wanted to argue for, rather than engaging it.

Why is this important?

Because these are the sharper tools in the conservative shed; these are the adult tables at the conservative Thanksgiving dinners, these are whatever your metaphor of choice is for the smart, intelligent, articulate end of conservative media. And they get kinda crazy sometimes and aren’t shy about ignoring evidence that contradicts their comforting narratives. These people are, after all, in the business of attracting readers, not being bold truthtellers.

And this is the high watermark of the conversation. From there you get down to conservatives who lie — constantly — complaining that the media is lying to get Obama elected, that voter fraud is running rampant despite all evidence to the contrary, to attacking facts as objective things that can be checked or verified. And then, thankfully for the lolz, there’s always Fox News.

And a lot has already been written about this subject by writers more experienced and qualified to do so than myself. I’d suggest James Fallows at The Atlantic as a great starting point on the topic of conservatives totally losing their shit – legislatively, in the media, and intellectually – during the drive to go all-in against Obama. As someone who’s beat is the strategy and tactics of a modern election cycle, this concerns me for one primary reason (as an engaged citizen in a floundering democracy, I’ve got a fuckton of other reasons I’m concerned)…

Because it leads to bad tactics. I’ve been saying since this election started in January with the beginning of primary season, Republicans have made a strategic choice — it is more important to them to defeat Barack Obama than it is to win the White House. These two goals sound like they’re more or less the same thing, but there’s a great strategic difference between the two.

I said in my last column that this is a base election. Both candidates are charting a tactical course that is more about making their opposition so incredibly unacceptable to voters, because they — at bottom — have nothing worth actually running on themselves. They can’t convince you to vote for them, but they can convince you to vote against their opposition.

Since the beginning, Mitt Romney’s campaign has set out to tell you how bad this President has been, thus convincing voters to vote for him as the only alternative. He’s yet to offer detailed policies, but he has plenty of attack lines and corresponding attack ads. Alex Pareene — among others — offers an interesting theory of why, just maybe, this strategy has a lot to do with the perceived media bias against Romney, and he gets to swear so I always link to him rather than more staid commentators:

“But it’s true that the president is currently getting a lot less bad press for his campaigning than Romney. It’s because he’s better at campaigning than Romney. (Here’s Obama’s One Weird Tip for Getting a Pass: The president is, personally, nearly always respectful and fair to his opponent, even when his campaign is in slash-and-burn mode.)

The answer for Mitt Romney isn’t ‘be more substantive’ or ‘make it about real issues’ or ‘be more detailed’ or any of that shit. Romney’s totally correct to be as vague as possible about the specifics of his proposals. The answer is a lot simpler: Just bullshit the press better!

Here’s how Mitt Romney can earn himself much kinder media coverage: Talk like Jon Huntsman. If he wants the press to let up, all he needs to do (and he should have been doing this since the day he wrapped up the nomination) is sound ‘moderate’ in public and leave the nutty stuff to vaguely affiliated allies and targeted niche media.”

Or, to put it another way: bad news, conservative friends your candidate is losing because he is a bad candidate running a dismally bad campaign. Polls aren’t weighted against him, they’re using a variety of methodology and generally finding that the President is winning. The media isn’t out to get him, Romney just keeps making stupid mistakes. His campaign is so deeply in trouble that convention speakers used their time at the dais to pitch for themselves rather than for a Romney presidency.

Because their aim has never been for Mitt Romney to win the presidency. It’s been to deny another term to Barack Obama. This is why we’ve seen we’ve seen endless pieces about the so-called vetting of the President that routinely uncover nothing. This is why each potential scandal is suggested to have Watergate-proportions behind them, yet reveal nothing of the sort. This is why — in Pareene’s formulation — Mitt Romney fails to bullshit the press, because his greatest applause lines, that his audience is dying to hear, are about how the President is a filthy liar, or un-American, or a secret socialist. They’re not about how great President Romney is going to be for anyone who doesn’t define “great” as the guy who repeals 100% of Obamacare on day one.

And in that alternate reality, where all those horrible things are true, the good news, for Mitt Romney at least, is that he’s winning.

Next week is the first Presidential debate, so I’ll be back after that with less dense reading and much more swearing.

Related Posts
Tactical Animal: On Politicking
Tactical Animal: Regarding The Pain Of Being Right…Or More Reasons Mitt Romney Will Never Be Your President
Tactical Animal: Have You Got Yourself The Belly For It?
Tactical Animal: Sorry Folks, Election’s Over, Donkey Out Front Shoulda Told Ya
Tactical Animal: Politics In The Post-Truth Era
Tactical Animal: Now We’ve Got Ourselves A Race

Title: What The Hell Are You Eating??
Corny Title: Q: Why Did The Chicken Nugget Have Ears? A: Because It Was Made Of Corn!

by Lee Camp

Okay, I know it’s not polite to comment on someone’s diet, but you and I need to talk. …You’re eating too much corn. Really, you have to chill out on the corn. Breakfast, lunch, AND dinner? What are you nuts?! And I know what you’re thinking – “I don’t eat that much corn.” But you’ve forgotten about one thing – the fact that you’re wrong. Watch the video.

**UPDATE**

Lee Camp will be performing one night only in Denver, CO! If you haven’t heard of him, Camp is best known for going live on Fox News and calling them “a parade of propaganda and a festival of ignorance.” George Carlin’s daughter Kelly called him “One of the few keeping my dad’s torch lit.” SuicideGirls called him “Better than boobs!” and two weeks ago Rolling Stone said he “gets the crowd roaring!” He’s a contributor for The Onion and has been featured on most major TV networks. And now you’re thinking, “But I don’t have $20 to spend on a comedian.” Well, that’s good to hear – because the cost is a $5 recommended donation at the door.

It’s TONIGHT at 10pm at Deer Pile, located at 206 East 13th Ave. in Denver.

[..]

by Steven Whitney

Nation-building is a perilous task, mostly because the people you are allegedly “saving” from oppressive regimes often don’t share the same world view or want the things we think they should want.

For decades, hard line American foreign policy experts found it expedient to install or keep in office leaders whose greatest (and sometimes only) asset was their pro-American stance, aided by billions of American foreign aid dollars. They didn’t care if we were propping up a royal personage (Hassan II / Morocco), an upwardly mobile warlord (Barre / Somalia), a cruel dictator (Pinochet / Chile), or even an outright mass murderer (Pol Pot / Cambodia). It was a classic devil’s deal: as long as these puppet dictators let the USA pull their strings, we supported them, usually disregarding the popular (and underground) leaders who might have been elected by a democratic process. It was and is an anachronistically paternalistic policy – America as Father Knows Best – and it is thankfully dipping below the horizon of our history.

In the meantime, the excesses of these tyrants eventually turned their countries against them, most recently in Libya, Syria, and Egypt. And we supported the rebellions. But if America is going to promote – or at least not get in the way of – democracy abroad, it must realize that it is often not going to like the results. These new democracies are not created to please us, but rather to free their own people and let them choose their own leaders – that’s what democracy is about.

Like life itself, politics is a messy business, especially when you do the right thing and it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted or expected. In this new century of global integration, we have to stop acting like spoiled children accustomed to always getting our way and learn that self-determination means just that.

There’s a price to be paid for freedom…and often it is spread around unpredictably.

Republicans and Fox News howled when they discovered that “God” was not mentioned in the 2012 Democratic Platform. A veritable hue and cry followed. Democrats hastily put together a Yay or Nay convention floor vote with no audible winner. While the word “potential” was eventually changed to “God-given,” the DNC might have seized the opportunity to point out that the Constitution of the United States, the document office-holders are sworn to uphold, also does not contain the word “God.”

Look up the Constitution on the web. Then click Find for the word “God.” It won’t come up…because it isn’t there.

Our founders were extremely clear about the separation of church and state. Anyone who thinks otherwise should spend the rest of their days searching for God in our Constitution.

In most cases, children first discover the world at large in their local library…and adults find almost anything they need to learn or want to enjoy. Except for actual schools, libraries contribute more than any other institution to our growth as human beings and to the society we live in. They are the social hub of information sharing and, unlike most elected officials, libraries serve their entire communities, so when even one is in danger of closing, it’s imperative that the community push back.

Faced with just such a threat the good citizens of Troy, Michigan pushed back against the Tea Party / Grover Norquist tax fanatics. Watch this short video to see how the smartest use of reverse psychology I’ve ever witnessed saved their library.

These voters are not only informed, but amazingly creative. Bravo!

Writers generally love words. Lately, one phrase keeps intruding on my thoughts – “to the manor born.” It holds visions of British aristocracy, Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs. But now American has its own version.

Doesn’t Mitt Romney (and to a lesser extent, Paul Ryan) perfectly embody the concept of “to the manor born?”

Time magazine recently reported that more than one hundred bird species, including chickens, engage in some sort of homosexual behavior, much of it “casual sex.” And a study at Virginia Tech in 1964 discovered that cockerels placed in cages only with same sex chickens started getting it on pretty quickly. Of course, the bible on the topic is Bruce Bagemidhi’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, which confirmed Darwin’s finding that diverse sexual behavior – homosexuality, bisexuality, and more – naturally occurs in almost all animal species, including humans and chickens.

As a result, anonymous sources have revealed that in an all-out effort to prevent gay chickens from hitting their grills, CEO Dan Cathy has commissioned famed Minnesota sex orientation adjuster Marcus Bachmann to visit every one of Chick-fil-A’s facilities to “pray the gay away” from their otherwise magnificently heterosexual chickens.

Fowl behavior, indeed.

Our Worse Than a Do Nothing Congress recently set a new and shameless low in governing standards. On September 21st, members of Congress recessed for the all-important business of getting re-elected in November. It was the earliest exit from D.C. in over 50 years.

Congress reconvened from its summer vacation on September 10th – and worked nine full days before calling it quits – obviously spent by their oppressive workload. They might not have come back at all but, as always, Republicans had some important bills to block.

First up was the Veterans Jobs Bill, which would have created jobs for 20,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It actually passed 58 to 40, but Senate Republicans killed it by lodging an objection that then required a 60 vote passage.

House Republicans also stalled the Farm Bill because its $23 billion cut in farm subsidies over ten years was not nearly enough. And, too, the GOP wants to replace subsidies with a new privately run “crop insurance” program with projected costs of over $1 trillion that creates myriad irrational incentives for small farmers (while, of course, favoring huge agribusiness concerns).

Attached to the farm bill was a provision passed by the Senate cutting food stamps expenditures by one-half of one per cent. House Republicans want to quadruple the cut, so the bill was effectively tabled. Food stamps help feed 46 million Americans, many of them working families, part of the 47% of Americans Romney/Ryan accuse of feeling “entitled to food,” and if the GOP has its way, “those people” will be dining only at Midnight Missions throughout the country

Due to so much unfinished business, Congress will reconvene after the November election. Since some – and hopefully many – Republicans will be lame ducks by then, perhaps a few will veer from the hard party line and actually use their votes to help everyday Americans.

The biggest mistake President Obama made during what is hopefully his first of two terms was during his State of the Union address before Congress in January, 2009. Back then he should have declared that in the almost 3 months since the election he had been briefed on every aspect of our government and that everything was much worse than we – and he – had been told.

I’m sure he wanted to use that forum to regenerate his message of hope, but his lack of candor supplied the GOP with their rallying cry today: “He didn’t fix our mess fast enough!”

The Bush/Cheney administration left our country in disastrous ruin on almost every front and it would take more than even the full team of Avengers to repair the damage, especially when Congress does nothing but obstruct proposed bills that would help us regain our fiscal health.

Instead, Obama’s first SOTU address fostered what by then was unrealistic hope and, when truly miraculous change didn’t happen, the President was blamed by every screaming Republican.

The truth is that Bush/Cheney dug us into such a deep hole, it might take a full decade or more to recover, even longer if the GOP maintains its obstructionist posture or, heaven forbid, gains power and returns to the policies drove us off the cliff in the first place.

On Election Day, all you really have to do is remember who led us into the quicksand of failed policies from 2001 to 2008. And then vote.

Related Posts:
From Death And Despair. . . Dreams Can Soar
Modest Solutions To Voter Suppression
Character. . . And The RNC
The Do-Damage Congress: Who’s Responsible?
Worse Than A Do Nothing Congress
Forget The Barbeque On Labor Day – It’s Time To Take Care Of Business
Chicken Shits: The Slippery Slopes of Chick-fil-A
The Vagina Solution
Fighting Back Part 4: The Big Liar, Intimidation And Revenge
Fighting Back Part 3: Fighting Fire With Fire
When The Past Is Prologue
Fighting Back Part 2: Defining Rovian Politics
Fighting Back
The Electoral Scam
Being Fair
Occupy Reality
Giving. . . And Taking Back
A Tale Of Two Grovers
A Last Pitch For Truth
America: Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
Gotcha!

by ChrisSick

Or, a helpful guide for aspiring Werewolves and how that leads to the strangulation of senatorial aspirations by very expensive coattails.

“He [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid] is the latest in a long line of political leaders to channel the ruthless wisdom of another former Senate majority leader, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, as the late Hunter S. Thompson told it, sealed a comeback win in his 1948 Senate primary campaign by calling a news conference to allege that his opponent, a prominent and well-regarded pig rancher, ‘was having routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard animals.’

When Johnson’s press secretary balked, saying it wasn’t true, Johnson spat back: ‘Of course it’s not, but let’s make the bastard deny it.’”

—Gregory J. Krieg, Harry Reid’s Attack Boxes Mitt Romney In, ABC News, 7 Auguest,2012

Let us, for a moment, in a relatively slow week that’s already been much dissected and discussed, get a bit…elemental.

Politicians, at bottom, have only one job that comes in two parts. Traditionally they really only had to work at this job in the late summer and early fall, but these days they tend to be year round affairs. To be a politician:

1. Move in a straight line.
2. Move your opponent off their straight line.

That line, of course, being basically a straight shot to whatever office they’re running for.

This is politics at its most basic, and come debate night, as you soak in the warm stream of disinformation fed to you by professional talking heads — many of whom should probably be in prison — you’ll probably hear the phrase on-message quite a bit. You’ll hear, and surely have heard, much talk of candidates building narratives. You’ll hear dissection, autopsy, and painful amounts of over-analysis about who “scored” with good lines that most effectively needled in their side’s pre-established talking point.

Its all horseshit, of course.

“Narrative,” “on-message”, and “talking points” are really creative and educated (-sounding) ways of saying who moved down their path the straightest and who deviated the most. Because that’s all politics — in a two-party race/system, anyway, which is all I’m intimately familiar with as a citizen of this country — really is about. Whether you move your opponent off his path by accusing them of not paying taxes for ten years or of fucking their livestock, it doesn’t really make much of a difference at the end of the day.

Everything else is phoney artifice and bullshit jargon thrown at voters, candidates, and media alike to blind them with science and convince them that David Axelrod or Ed Gillespie is really worth somewhere between $175,000 to $1.3 million per year they earn advising their candidates. Their job is to come up with a good story somewhere between six months to a year before the election, and then spend the rest of the cycle as glorified babysitters and occasional mouthpieces. A job — it’s worth noting — that Ed Gillespie still manages to both fuck up and get paid a bonus for, somehow.

Those of us in my age group — the one that was politically aware but not yet politically active during Bill Clinton’s first and second terms — are familiar with one of the greatest narratives of modern politics, because it’s only four words long: The Man From Hope. But no matter how much attention you were paying in junior high, you couldn’t fully grasp Clinton’s incredible political ability until you heard him get the DNC to applaud George W., moments before turning it into an attack line against congressional Republicans.

Which brings us neatly back to my point, about the line and how one follows it or doesn’t. From the jump, Obama and his team have called this a choice election, while Romney and his team have called it a referendum election. And — please, allow me to parse the bullshit for you since I’m pretty sure it’s part of my job here — that should tell you all that you need to know.

Neither team feels strongly enough about its message or its candidate (read: product), to trust that voters will vote for them. This is why this is a base election (in more ways than one), because unless you’re already in the bag for one of the two candidates, its extremely unlike either is going to offer you a very compelling reason to vote for them. So the best they can hope for is to convince you to vote against their opponent.

To that end, Romney’s “straight line” was through convincing voters to — in the memorable words of a geriatric cowboy arguing with a chair while trolling his way to a nation’s heart — fire the President for poor performance. And Obama’s was to scare the living shit out of you by basically pointing to Republicans not named Romney (cough, Paul Ryan, cough) and reminding you all those white dudes share the same party.

It’s really that simple, and every day Romney spent talking about his taxes, defending his 47% comments, or trying to dispense with the notion that his campaign was in disarray — and holy fucking shit that was just this week — he was off his path and losing this election. Now both the head of the RNC and his own VP have taken up the language of “choice election,” which is pretty much his two biggest public supporters hammering the last nails in — what I’m sure is — his very expensive and luxurious coffin.

But seriously, fuck that guy. Never liked him.

In fact, he’s so bad at this, that he’s knocked every Republican Senator off their path this past week.

“The trend in the presidential race has been difficult to discern lately. President Obama has very probably gained ground since the conventions, but it’s hard to say exactly how much, and how quickly his bounce is eroding.

There are no such ambiguities in the race for control of the Senate, however. Polls show key races shifting decisively toward the Democrats, with the Republican position deteriorating almost by the day.”

—Nate Silver, “Senate Forecast: What Has Gone Wrong for GOP Candidates?,” FiveThirtyEight Blog, 20 September, 2012

Silver offers two potential hypothesis to explain the sudden decrease in the chance of Harry Reid losing his gavel come January: One is that Romney is so terrible he’s hurting all of his party’s candidates in tough statewide elections.
The other is that their own extreme conservatism is hurting the entire GOP brand, as evidenced by moderate candidate Linda McMahon of CT (yes, that Linda McMahon, we live in a country where the best experience you can have prior to going into politics is, actually, pro-wrestling. Suck it up, buttercup!) and mostly-moderate Senator Scott Brown of MA are distancing themselves from the national party.

My modest suggestion is that both reasons factor in. Because, really, under the circumstance who can stay on the path, or if you prefer, build their narrative, stay on message, or stick to their talking points? Romney cannot stay on message, because his message changes from day to accommodate his audience while simultaneously accommodating his rapidly degenerating-into-insanity-base.

It isn’t that Romney’s a bad politician, he’s exactly the best the Republicans had to offer this election cycle. It’s just — in part — that Barack Obama is actually a very good politician. If there’s any lesson liberals and Democrats needed to take away from the Bush years, it was the danger of underestimating your opposition. Jokes about Karl Rove’s weight may play well with the peanut gallery, but really, underestimating that man as a political strategist is just shy of insanity.

And when you compile the long list of things that the Conservative Right is convinced that Obama is — a list that would have to include how he’s a stunning incompetent, bumbling idiot, and empty suit, who ALSO somehow managed to trick 53% of the country to vote for him, while concealing his secret Muslim origins and Marxist ideology — it isn’t hard to see how underestimating their opposition lead the GOP to the hole they’re in now.

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by Lee Camp

You’ve heard it before from rappers – C.R.E.A.M. – Cash Rules Everything Around Me. Does it? Or is money just a simple measuring stick that we’ve allowed to run away with itself? Are people dying because of our simplistic inability to wrap our heads around these funny green pieces of paper? Or is it possible…Sorry! Gotta run! They’re announcing the Lottery numbers!

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An excerpt from Greg Palast’s new book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, including a comic book by Ted Rall and an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In 1996, Republicans were investigating President Clinton, that is, sniffing at his zipper and a wet cigar.

But I follow the money, not the semen. My target was an electric company, Entergy, one of Hillary Clinton’s law clients whom I’d been tracking since 1985.* The Entergy money trail took me from Little Rock, Arkansas, to China, and right into the Oval Office. This was a hell of a lot more serious than an intern under the desk.

When Bill Clinton became president, Hillary’s Little Rock client suddenly became a transglobal power-industry behemoth. Entergy bought the Indian Point nuclear plants in New York and the entire electricity system of London, England. Its big score was to team up with the Riady family of Indonesia, ethnic Chinese billionaires with big plans to run the power systems of China.

But the Riadys and Entergy needed Clinton and his Commerce Secretary Ron Brown to grease up the Chinese for them, beginning with Brown taking Entergy bosses on a deal-making trip to China.

Secretary Brown was not pleased. According to his long-time business partner and love interest, Nolanda Hill. Brown fumed, “I’m not Hillary’s motherfucking tour guide!”

The problem for the secretary was not the deed but the price. Brown, previously chairman of the Democratic Party, had enthusiastically endorsed a Hillary cash-for-access scheme: $10,000 for coffee with the president, $100,000 for a night in the Lincoln bedroom. But he resented the discount rate Hillary put on US executives joining Brown’s own lucrative trade missions. The commerce secretary pouted, “I’m worth more than $50,000 a pop!”

But Brown had nothing to fear regarding his price: the Clinton campaign chest got a lot more than fifty thousand for the “pop.”

Now follow this:

On June 22, 1994, the billionaire James Riady met with Webster Hubbell, former associate attorney general and Hillary Clinton’s former law partner.

On June 23, Riady met with Hubbell for breakfast, then went to the White House, then returned to meet again with Hubbell, then made two more treks to the White House.

On June 26, videotape shows the beginning of a meeting in the Oval Office between President Clinton and Riady before the tape goes blank.

On June 27, Riady retains Hubbell as a consultant to Entergy.

How much advising Hubbell could do from prison, it was not clear.

At the time of his meetings with Riady, when he got his check, Hubbell was under indictment for fraudulently inflating his legal bills, a felony. He pled guilty.

Now, I’ve conducted investigations of lawyer over-billing. How can one law partner fake detailed time logs without the complicity of another lawyer in the firm? Hillary’s logs were worth close inspection by authorities.

Funny thing about Hillary’s billing records: when requested for disclosure in an unrelated matter, they dis-appeared. First, her law firm’s computers went kablooey. Then the paper printouts vanished. But during the 1992 presidential campaign, just before the logs disappeared, her partner Web Hubbell secretly combed them over, line by line.

Hubbell knew his own logs were phony, and he understood the consequences of exposure: prison. Ultimately, the bloated hours on those records caused him to lose his law license, his Justice Department post, and his freedom—twenty-one months in the slammer.

What did Hubbell see and know about Hillary’s own billing logs? Hubbell won’t say, except for a cryptic remark, after seeing her bills, that “every lawyer” fabricates records. Does “every” include Hillary? Hubbell wouldn’t say.

If he ratted out Hillary, he might have bargained himself an easy plea bargain. But Hubbell was a champ: silent. Why would Hubbell choose to do time on the chain gang over testifying about Hillary? Could it be the $100,000 from the Riadys? (Altogether, Hubbell collected half a million dollars in the weeks up to his entering the slammer.)

Hillary’s billing records finally reappeared, two years later, just outside her office, right after Hubbell’s refusal to testify against her.

Maybe the Clintons knew nothing about the Riady money flowing to prison-bound Hubbell. Knowledge of the payments would suggest they were buying Hubbell’s silence. That would be a criminal offense. An impeachable offense.

In notes I’ve obtained of the FBI’s conversation with the president (who was under oath), Clinton first said he couldn’t remember if Riady mentioned the $100,000 payment. Then, Clinton slyly opened the door to the truth, telling the agents, “I wouldn’t be surprised if James told me.”

Neither would I.

In all, James, his father, and Riady reps met with Clinton some ninety-eight times.

Four years after the Hubbell-Riady-Clinton meetings and payments, on December 31, 1998, Republican Senator Thompson’s Governmental Affairs Committee shut down. They hadn’t called the key witnesses against Clinton, and had issued no subpoenas for the key documents. Why? Why did the Republicans suddenly halt their inquiry into Clinton’s fundraising just as they were closing in on the damning evidence?

It was the same day Chairman Thompson shut down the investigation of the Koch Brothers.

I could put two and two together. But just to make sure, I called the committee to confirm that two plus two made four. Sure enough, my insider, requesting anonymity, confirmed it was a secret straight-up deal between Republican and Democratic senators.

“A truce: You don’t do Triad and we don’t do Clinton [on Riady cash].”

PS: How did some unknown governor from the Podunk state rise like a rocket from Little Rock to the White House, zoom out of nowhere to become, in 1992, the nominee of the Democratic Party? But Bill Clinton didn’t exactly come from nowhere: he came from the Democratic Leadership Council. DLC Chairman Bill Clinton presided over this new caucus of conservative Democrats, and his nomination as the Democrat’s presidential candidate ended half a century of control of the party by the tough-regulation philosophy of Franklin Roosevelt. Rather than FDR, the DLC’s antigovernment rhetoric, its complaining about bureaucrats, rules, and regulations, echoed the philosophy of the Koch-funded Cato Institute.

And that’s not surprising: the DLC was funded by $100,000 from the Koch Brothers.

Did the DLC investment pay off for the Kochs?

Once in the White House, Bill Clinton issued an Executive Order to force agencies to halt or roll back regulations based on costs to industry. Public health, welfare, and safety would no longer rule. The chief of Clinton’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government, Vice President Al Gore, directed the anti-regulatory attack with gusto, announcing he was “ending the era of big government.” Gore created “regulatory partnerships,” giving official review powers to executives of regulated industries. The Clinton-Gore administration radically slowed the movement to cap greenhouse gas emissions by heavily promoting a system of indulgences, “pollution credits,” that allowed polluters to simply purchase the right to pollute. C. Boyden Gray, then head of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the lobby group founded by the Kochs, devised this “cap-and-trade” system.

In later years, the Kochs’ Citizens for a Sound Economy became FreedomWorks, the precursor of the Tea Party. The Kochs’ chairman of FreedomWorks, that same Boyden Gray, is today leading the Tea Party crusade against “cap and trade,” the pollution credit system created by . . . Boyden Gray. If you think that’s a contradiction, you’re not paying attention. The strategy of well-timed, stepwise manipulation of national policy debate evidenced here is nothing if not brilliant. The Kochs play an elaborate game of chess and we can’t even see the board.

And did I say that the Kochs funded the rise of both presidential nominees, Clinton and his opponent, Bob Dole? Sure did. Billionaire Rule Number two: Don’t bet on a horse when you can buy the whole damn racetrack.

But there was still the little matter of criminality. Riady money from Indonesia, Koch money through “Children’s Future,” fake-o foundations and political hit squads posing as think tanks, all this funny juice running through political arteries was, of course, illegal.

Illegal, that is, until 2010, until Citizens United and SpeechNow. For $200 and a post office box provided by a sketchy lawyer, the Riadys, the Zetas Gang Inc., British Petroleum, Qaeda Corp, Charles Manson LLC, and Vladimir Putin Partners can all incorporate and dump cash into US campaigns till their dark hearts are content. And so too the Christian Coalition and the Chinese politburo, giving a whole new meaning to the term “Manchurian Candidate.”

One other thing: Just who are these “Citizens” that were “United” for Citizens United? How could this teeny group hire a supreme lawyer like Ted Olson to argue before the Supreme Court? Olson, former US solicitor general, doesn’t work for peanuts. How could Olson keep body and soul together during this time-consuming litigation? Apparently he was given leave from his duties as legal counsel at . . . Koch Industries.

Read the rest in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. For more info visit: BallotBandits.org

* I was originally asked to investigate the company in 1981 by the attorney general of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. But I was a big-shot New York investigator with no interest in working for some small-time politician from Dawg Patch. Too bad: I could have put him on the straight path.

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