Motley Moose – Archive

 

Actually, the GOP version is only about 6,000 years

[Cross-posted from Teh Orange]

It’s not easy being green a GOPasaur. All signs points to their individual and collective extinction, yet they still walk the Earth, seemingly oblivious to their fate, unable to see what any sentient creature could see: it’s so over. The planet, it seems, is moving on without them and they’re left to ponder the cruel vicissitudes of fate. For surely, it must just be fate, right?? It couldn’t have been anything that they said or did, could it??

Like young children, taking to heart their teachers’ threats that their latest malfeasance would be etched in stone on their Permanent Record, GOPasaurs live in perpetual dread that their crimes, misdeeds, ethical lapses, and offhand remarks about female reproduction. Unfortunately (for them), while their witless song may have ended, the malady lingers on, thanks to the preservative properties of the fossil record.

Thus is is with unalloyed joy that some of our paleo-pals have discovered a solution to their extinction fears, a way to wipe the slate clean of their missteps and recast themselves in ways that the votersaurs will find appealing, even irresistable. Follow along below the Gobi Desert Easter Egg for the Rest of the Story…  

The campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has entered a new phase and it is beginning to look like support for Romney and Gingrich aligns with the deepening division between “establishment” Republicans and the insurgent Tea Party movement.  We have seen Tea Party support crystallise around Gingrich, even though he is an “imperfect vessel,” largely because they are even more unwilling to support the mainstream candidate.  

The Republican party is experiencing an insurgency among the same disaffected cohorts they had enlisted in their campaigns against Obama and it’s causing a degree of panic within their ranks evident in the sheer volume of negative campaigning they have deployed, most recently in the Florida primary, where their advertising buy is approaching $13.8 million; not to mention the unprecedented, co-ordinated public attacks on Gingrich’s candidacy by former and current legislative Republicans.  Consider the reaction from the self-appointed spokeswoman of the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin:

What we saw with this ridiculous opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque rewriting of history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst.

But this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party grassroots and independent Americans who are sick of the politics of personal destruction used now by both parties’ operatives with a complicit media egging it on. In fact, the establishment has been just as dismissive of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Newt is an imperfect vessel for Tea Party support, but in South Carolina the Tea Party chose to get behind him instead of the old guard’s choice. In response, the GOP establishment voices denounced South Carolinian voters with the same vitriol we usually see from the left when they spew hatred at everyday Americans “bitterly clinging” to their faith and their Second Amendment rights. The Tea Party was once again told to sit down and shut up and listen to the “wisdom” of their betters.

Sarah Palin – Cannibals in GOP Establishment Employ Tactics of the Left Facebook 27 Jan 12

That Palin would identify the GOP establishment as the opposition and characterise their behaviour as “cannibalism” suggests the famous aphorism on the French revolution:

La révolution dévore ses enfants.

Georg Büchner, Danton’s Death, Act I (1835)

The revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children.  And Republicans are setting themselves up for an inevitable banquet on Newt and his supporters; a recipe for a disastrous nomination fight entirely of their own making and a Tea Party cohort even angrier at them than Obama, if such a thing is possible.  The challenge for Democrats is to stand back and let them have it out, for now.  They seem to be making an excellent job of it so far.

At last some progressives are awakening to the political reality of our economic condition:

Nothing in this year’s exit polling hurt more than this:

Got that? Of the 35 percent who think Wall Street is to blame for our economic problems, 57 percent voted Republican – the party that does nothing but carry water for Wall Street.

Kos – Get Wall Street out of the White House Daily Kos 18 Nov 10

Yeah.  But what makes Democrats so different?  Well…  Not much, it seems:

…people think there is no difference between the parties when it comes to the rich and powerful.  And why should they?  Obama’s finance team is essentially a branch office of Goldman Sachs and company.

Kos – Get Wall Street out of the White House Daily Kos 18 Nov 10

Time to get serious, folks.  And big decision time for Obama.  I think Kos has got this right:

Here’s the bottom line – Obama and the Democrats need to repair their relationship with voters.  They can either focus on that, and the hell with Wall Street’s hurt feefees, or we’re headed for a Republican trifecta in the White House, Senate, and House in 2012.

Kos – Get Wall Street out of the White House Daily Kos 18 Nov 10

The next president will be the one who has convinced a nation of confused and angry voters that he or she is going to lead an administration which will put a stop to this nonsense, and let the chips fall where they may.

It would have probably been fair to say of Sarah Palin that until a few days ago ‘policy wonk’ would have been an unlikely description, love her or loathe her, of any facet of her complex relationship with American politics.

But now this:

I’m deeply concerned about the Federal Reserve’s plans to buy up anywhere from $600 billion to as much as $1 trillion of government securities.  The technical term for it is “quantitative easing.” It means our government is pumping money into the banking system by buying up treasury bonds.  And where, you may ask, are we getting the money to pay for all this?  We’re printing it out of thin air.

Sarah Palin via Robert Costa- Palin to Bernanke: ‘Cease and Desist’ National Review 7 Nov 10

That’s very interesting on a lot of levels.  The piece is coherent and sober and, more importantly, it is aimed directly at a weak point in the current administration’s monetary policy and an electoral vulnerability in the allegiances of establishment Republicans in the newly constituted House of Representatives.  Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, the champion of this recently announced second round of ‘quantitative easing,’ promised Congress on 3 June 2009 that the Federal Reserve would not ‘monetise the debt‘ of the US government, in other words just print money “out of thin air.”  But that seems to be exactly what we are now proposing to do and there are dissenting opinions within the Federal Reserve system itself:

For the next eight months, the nation’s central bank will be monetizing the federal debt.

This is risky business. We know that history is littered with the economic carcasses of nations that incorporated this as a regular central bank practice.  So how can the [‘quantitative easing’] decision made last Wednesday be justified?

Richard W Fischer – Recent Decisions of the Federal Open Market Committee: A Bridge to Fiscal Sanity? Federal Reserve of Dallas 8 Nov 10

So which is it?  Well, that all depends on whose telling the story.  But it’s already a done deal.

FOX News spent all of Saturday covering the rally in Searchlight Nevada, hometown of Harry Reid.  The event was a Tea Party rally, a movement created out of whole cloth by FOX.  The keynote at the rally was FOX employee Sarah Palin, who railed against the coverage of the recent spilling-over of violence that she and other FOX employees have instigated against Democratic Party politicians, staffers and supporters.  

In this clip from FOX News Channel today we see FOX Employee Palin telling the FOX-created movement’s followers that what America wants is “Fair and Balanced” news (FOX Broadcasting’s official tagline), which the entirely FOX-viewing crowd cheered at so that their friends watching FOX back at home could see them cheering the FOX employee on stage.

This is making me dizzy.

TurboTax has joined a growing group of companies who as of today number at one hundred and twenty.  These are the companies who had been sponsors of the Glenn Beck Show who have pulled their support.  Turbotax ran ads on the Glenn Beck Show for two days before issuing this statement:

Thanks everyone for your feedback, & for reminding us of what we value. We’ve pulled advertising from the Glenn Beck show.

As the swallows to Capistrano issue in a new spring every year, so too do the increasing glints of sanity we see around us harken to a warming period ahead where the vicious Tea-stained winds of the waning season fade into memory.

Sometimes, the headlines write themselves.

Gov. Sarah Palin owes more than a half million dollars to an Anchorage law firm that has defended her against ethics complaints, and she may create a legal fund to pay the bill, she said Friday.

Poor Sarah. Being targeted by a “partisan witch hunt” during the Troopergate scandal has set her back a cool half a mil, it seems. Sadly, it seems that capitalism is alive and well at all the most inconvenient times, doesn’t it? Gosh, Sarah, shouldn’t you just buck up to your “personal responsibility”, and knock off this socialism garbage, what with getting other people to pay your legal bills?

Of course, there’s a really good reason for all this- right?

“Now, it seems in order to do this job as Governor, with the political blood sport some are playing today, only the independently wealthy or those willing to spend their income on legal fees to defend their official actions in office … can serve,” Palin said…

OR- and I’m going to go out on a limb here- you could, just, uhh… not do anything to cause yourself to be investigated for ethics violations. Maybe that’s too much to ask for? Anyway, you know the story’s not complete until you see some Republican spin on the situation- blame Johnny Mac/teh eveil libs!

This is what we were told.  It is what many who voted for Sarah Palin believed.  It is what a gentleman here in Sarasota believed enough to say to me directly a few days before the election: “Obama sympathizes with terrorists.”

On Friday, the US sent two Hellfire missiles from Afghanistan-based Predator drones into Zharki Village in Pakistan’s Waziristan region, accepted as the home of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda leadership.  Eighteen people were reported killed in the two locations, locals report that the Taliban removed eight of the bodies:

Resident Allah Noor Wazir said he attended funerals for the owner of the targeted house, Din Faraz, his three sons and a guest.

“I also heard that three bodies had been taken away by Taliban. They say they belong to foreigners,” Wazir told the AP by telephone.

I feel for the innocent victims of these missile strikes (I will assume there were some family members killed who were not directly a part of the war), but from early reports it seems that the buildings they were in were valid military targets.

This is partly a diary to celebrate the survival of the Moose over the dangerous last few months while Sarah Palin was circling in a helicopter with her telescopic rifle, and also a summary of a talk I will be doing on Thursday November 20th, at a plenary session that will start at about 10 a.m EST and last for an hour and a half.

The Conference is called No Frontiers? Free Speech and the Internet and is hosted by English PEN, the 21st Century Trust, and is being covered by The Guardian in its Comment is Free section. My specific talk is: Crashing The Sweetiegate – how online forums and political advocacy could transform the political sphere

For my fellow Moosers, the title (suggested by the organisers) is self explanatory, and some of you will be familiar with basic argument from my Flaming for Obama piece in Prospect Magazine last month, which drew an unexpectedly benign response from the proprietor of MYDD.

But here I’m inviting you all to show how the liberal blogosphere works, and respond in real time, or whatever time you choose, to the basic points with critiques, thoughts, flames or fail cartoons.  

Senator John McCain’s vice presidential pick is looking like a bigger mistake day by day. There is growing evidence that Governor Sarah Palin has become a drag on the flailing Republican ticket.  The Republican nominee is already weighed down by the failures of the Bush administration and our deteriorating economy, but it’s looking more and more like Palin may be the final nail in the coffin.