Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Romney’s other rhetorical atrocity: “Palestinians not wanting to see peace”

It’s a disgusting, borderline racist generalization and flies in the face of the reality of one of the most complex socio-political phenomena in the world.  For those of you who engage with people from the right in other fora, I think the following article from Peter Beinart, a writer with whom I often disagree, will prove quite helpful.  

It contains some useful links as well, such as one to data from Khalil Shikaki, the most internationally respected Palestinian pollster.  (Of course, beware that right-wingers, with their fascination with ‘guilt by association’ may point out that his brother, Fathi, was the founder of Islamic Jihad.  This has happened to me.  If one’s brother is a terrorist, one can’t possibly be a respected Political Scientist.  Because siblings always agree and always resemble one another.  Always.  Perfectly.  Since Cain and Abel.  Right?)

Anyway, as I said, the article is not only compelling and interesting and sympathetic to the world views of Moose on the subject (as I have witnessed it) it is also useful.

PS One of my biggest critiques of Obama’s first term regards his decision not to visit here.  I want to see him come and give speeches in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, and perhaps Akko (Acre) as nearly a third of its inhabitants are Palistinians, mainly Muslims, but some Christians as well.  I think one of the only things that might move things here is if he addressed both Jews and Palestinians and their governments directly.  He would need to thread a few needles.  But he’s capable of doing that.  

I also think he should ask Bill Clinton to take up Mitchell’s role as a special envoy.  Trust is being built between them.  HRC is stepping down as Sec. of State.  Clinton won’t toe Obama’s line on everything, but I doubt he’d embarrass him outright.  And wouldn’t Clinton relish the chance to complete what he wanted to be his legacy as President?  (As if Northern Ireland isn’t enough for one president’s foreign policy achievements.  I’ll never understand why he doesn’t get more credit for that.  Centuries of bloodshed guided toward a political process where the peace has been tested [Omagh] and upheld by both sides.)


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/ 105 Comments

105 comments

  1. Shaun Appleby

    Romney’s gaffes have come so frequently lately that some which warrant headlines have been almost totally overlooked.  The man is a dangerous ass; seriously, it is an embarrassment to the whole country that he would be nominated by a major political party as candidate for the presidency.  He makes McCain seem like Disraeli.

  3. Chris Blask

    Romney and Netanyahu: Old Friends Now At Center Of Iran Nuke Debate

    Theirs is a relationship unlike any other in global politics.

    Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been friends for more than 35 years. The men first met while working as corporate business advisers at the Boston Consulting Group during the Israeli prime minister’s years living in the U.S.; then, over time, they would leave the private sector for lives in politics.

    …

    The release of secretly recorded tapes from a Romney fundraiser in Florida provided even more evidence of strong personal and political ties. Seeking to assuage donors’ concerns about campaign tactics and the staffers drawing them up, Romney rattled off his advisers’ bona fides.

    “I have a very good team of extraordinarily experienced, highly successful consultants, a couple of people in particular who’ve done races around the world,” he said. “I mean, they work for ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu in his race. So they do these races and they see which ads work and which processes work best.”

    There are, in fact, longstanding connections between Romney and Netanyahu’s closest consultants. Dan Senor, Romney’s most prominent foreign policy aide and a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion, reportedly worked with a top Netanyahu aide Ron Dermer to choreograph their July meeting.

  4. Chris Blask

    Mitt Romney’s path to victory is narrowing, new polling data suggest, presenting challenges for the Republican nominee at a moment when he is trying to rebound from a week of bad headlines by refocusing on federal spending.

    President Barack Obama has opened an eight percentage-point lead in Iowa and maintains a five-point edge in Colorado and Wisconsin, according to Wall Street Journal/NBC News/Marist Poll surveys of the three presidential battlegrounds released Thursday.

    The new poll results are significant in part because the Romney campaign views the three states as steppingstones to an Electoral College majority, given Mr. Romney’s slippage in polls of two of the largest battlegrounds, Ohio and Virginia.

    hmmmm.

  5. Shaun Appleby

    I was on to something with Mitt’s money woes:


    The financial tide turned against Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his key allies, who spent more than they brought in during the month of August, according to disclosures filed Thursday.

    Romney’s presidential campaign committee raised nearly $67 million last month – a strong figure – but spent about the same amount building its campaign organization and responding to a barrage of attack ads from Obama and his allies.  Even so, the campaign spent just $13.7 million on ads, which was less than the $15 million it spent in July.

    Dan Eggen – Romney campaign hits a financial snag Washington Post 21 Sep 12

    It’s actually worse than it looks when you get into the weeds; head-to-head Obama has a lot more cash to play with right now.  Most of Romney’s triumphant fundraising is RNC money he can’t use and which might follow the down-ticket races now that he’s faltering.  

    Pity there’s not a good financial guy on the Romney team, heh. This has been bouncing around the blogosphere for a couple of days and is slowly seeping up into the mainstream media.  Conventional wisdom dies hard.

  6. Peter Jukes

    I met him ten years ago, when he was obsessed by religious observance, and (erroneously assuming my background) muttered something about British Jews being embarrassed by their identity.

    Tony Judt, who effectively introduced us, excoriated Beinart in his iconoclastic 2003 piece “Bush’s Useful Idiots” about the Liberal enablers of Neocon thought.

    But since then, Beinart has gone on an amazing journey, and become one of the best commentators on the realities of Israeli and the as yet to be realised Palestinian state.

    I wish more people (yes I’m talking you Republican ersatz likudniks) would listen

  7. Shaun Appleby

    And a definitely hopeful sign:


    (Reuters) – Hundreds of pro-government protesters stormed the headquarters of the main Islamist militia group in Libya’s eastern city of Benghazi on Friday, Reuters witnesses said.

    Chanting “Libya, Libya”, the demonstrators pulled down flags of the Ansar Al-Sharia militia and torched a vehicle inside the base. There was no sign of resistance from the militia.

    Protesters storm main Islamist militia HQ in Libya’s Benghazi Reuters 21 Sep 12

    Bet they didn’t see that coming.

  8. Shaun Appleby

    Classic:

    Key and Peele are running rings around SNL this cycle with this bit; it is truly inspired and has endless possibilities.

  10. spacemanspiff

    http://mydd.com/2012/9/18/m-2

    By now it should be quite clear that Mitt Romney is as loathsome an individual as any that has ever disgraced our national stage. Simply put Mitt Romney is the most unqualified person ever to seek the presidency in my lifetime, perhaps ever. Without a doubt, he is certainly the most disingenuous and bald-faced hypocrite ever to seek the White House. He is a farce, one would hasten to add that he is a perfect parody of a plutocrat but for the fact that he actually is a plutocrat with his own bizarre sense of entitlement

    Awesome.  

  13. janicket

    http://politicalticker.blogs.c…

    Our resolute, decisively strong wannabe Leader of the Free (as long as you’re Rich) World has this to say:

    Mitt Romney blamed President Barack Obama for mischaracterizing his positions and forcing him to spend more time fund-raising, as the GOP presidential candidate looked to turn around his campaign trajectory and end a difficult week.

    [snip]

    On his plane, Romney said Obama had incorrectly portrayed his policy positions on issues as diverse as the automobile industry bailout to abortion to tax proposals.

    “He says I was in favor of liquidating the automobile industry – nothing could be further from the truth… He says I’m in favor of lowering taxes on wealthy people. No I’m not,” Romney said, and he criticized Democratic campaign commercials. “He keeps running these things even though he knows they’re wrong and saying them in rallies even though he knows they’re wrong.”

    [snip]

    The Republican White House hopeful, who spent much of last week raising money in California, Florida and Texas, blasted Obama for opting out of public financing and forcing both candidates to spend more time wooing donors.

    Not gonna waste my time pointing out all the lies and craptacular twisting going on in just those few short passages; I leave it as an exercise for any masochistically inclined readers.

    I’d ask if he’d like some cheese with that whine, but for Pete’s sake, he doesn’t drink (that we know of), so maybe some homemade cookies that didn’t come from 7-Eleven might soothe his troubled psyche?

  14. Shaun Appleby

    Oopsie:


    “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly,” [Romney] told the LA Times. “And you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem.”

    Annie-Rose Strasser – Romney Doesn’t Understand Why You Can’t Roll Down Windows On A Plane LAT via Think Progress

    That’s just the kind of thing which can make the average citizen ponder just what the heck goes on in the candidate’s head.  I mean, really?

  15. Chris Blask

    Ezra Klein has this article that really should be the start and finish of the debate.

    That’s really what the American tax system looks like: Not 47 percent paying nothing, but everybody paying something, and most Americans paying between 25 percent and 30 percent of their income – which is, by the way, a lot more the 13.9 percent Mitt Romney paid in 2011*

    Total tax burden is what matters, and it’s pretty flat. Everyone is paying something, only those at the very bottom get something of a break – as do those at the very top.

  16. Shaun Appleby

    Romney was sent on mission impossible, they say, with a flawed platform; I like Charles’ take:


    Over the past three decades or so, the Republican Party – and the conservative “movement’ that has powered it – has drunk deeply of the ideological Sterno. Now, it finds itself fumbling with the buttons on its clothes, speaking in strange tongues to the shrubbery, and waving imaginary butterflies away from its head.

    …it’s not your candidate. It’s not your strategy. It’s your ideas, which the country is rejecting because the country just came through the most immense pillaging of its public wealth in the history of human thievery and it has made the link between the piracy in question, and the fact that one of the only two political parties that we permit ourselves to have has been staggering around on the sidewalk, singing old hymns in Latvian while pushing respectable citizens like Willard Romney into oncoming traffic because the party thinks he looks like the man who’s come to put in the microchip. Canned heat, kids. Canned heat is killing you.

    Charles P Pierce – What Letting Paul Ryan Be Paul Ryan Gets You Esquire 24 Sep 12

    The prognosis isn’t good; “squeeze” is merciless.

  17. lojasmo

    Obama now up by double digits in Florida, Ohio, and pensylvania.

    Nate silver has Obama up by 7 points (80% to win the election) since the tape came out.

  19. janicket

    And what, if any, is true,* but Roger Simon has a hilarious story at Politico about Paul Ryan going rogue:

    http://dyn.politico.com/prints…

    Snippets:

    Though Ryan had already decided to distance himself from the floundering Romney campaign, he now feels totally uninhibited. Reportedly, he has been marching around his campaign bus, saying things like, “If Stench calls, take a message” and “Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.”

    [snip]

    But on Saturday, the day after he was booed [at AARP], Ryan broke free. Appearing at a town hall meeting at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Ryan showed the glitz, the glamour, the razzle-dazzle that he was supposed to bring to the campaign in the first place.

    He did a PowerPoint presentation for the crowd.

    [snip]

    A word about PowerPoint. PowerPoint was released by Microsoft in 1990 as a way to euthanize cattle using a method less cruel than hitting them over the head with iron mallets. After PETA successfully argued in court that PowerPoint actually was more cruel than iron mallets, the program was adopted by corporations for slide show presentations.

    Conducting a PowerPoint presentation is a lot like smoking a cigar. Only the person doing it likes it. The people around him want to hit him with a chair.

    PowerPoint is usually restricted to conference rooms where the doors are locked from the outside. It is, therefore, considered unsuited for large rallies, where people have a means of escape and where the purpose is to energize rather than daze.

    Hat tip to P.M. Carpenter for this giggle.

    * Oh, and Krugman is now saying it’s all satire:

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c…

    But it’s still funny.

  20. virginislandsguy

    And David Corn wins the MVP (reporter class)

    Josh ruminates on the likely turning point of the ’12 election:

    As I said when the story first broke (peeling aside all my teeth-gnashing and immense publisher envy), I thought the story was “devastating” and probably that rare story where the press actually understates the magnitude of the damage. I still do.

    …

    Then those 47% comments came along and it turned out that cartoon caricature Mitt Romney was actually real Mitt Romney.

    I suspect that’s when he definitively lost the race.

    …

    But at some point it becomes dishonest to pretend the outcome isn’t becoming pretty clear simply because of our instinctive fear of getting egg on our faces. For reasons bigwig reporters probably are not entirely able to grasp, I think 47% was devastating, a blow that sent Romney down for the count.

    I suspect this will be obvious when we look back in eight weeks.

    While I personally believe the race was lost by the Republicans long before this, 47% is good for the narrative of the death-rattle of Reaganism.

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