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Would you rather win with Chris Christie or lose with Ted Cruz?

by Mojambo ( 350 Comments › )
Filed under Barry Goldwater, Conservatism, Elections, Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Libertarianism, Mitt Romney, Politics, Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, Tea Parties, The Political Right at November 12th, 2013 - 2:00 pm

There is an element on the Right obsessed by purity that is more than happy to lose elections if they lose with the right candidate. Losing is for losers and just like there are no moral victories in the NFL (sorry to tell you that Jerry Jones)  there are no moral victories in politics. For those of you threatening to “sit it out” in 2016 if you do not get your perfect candidate remember this – people who are on the Right who think differently than you do are also capable of sitting it out too if the wrong guy or woman is the nominee. If the  choice is between Hillary Clinton (or Elizabeth Warren) and Chris Christie  I am on the fat mans bandwagon.

by Bernard Goldberg

Those sophisticates at Time magazine made a funny.  They put Chris Christie on their cover with the headline, “The Elephant in the Room.”  Get it?  Elephant.  Christie.  Time magazine did a junior high fat joke right there on its cover. Time’s executive editor Michael Duffy explained the cheap shot this way:   “Well, he’s obviously a big guy.  He’s obviously a big Republican.  But he’s also done a really huge thing here this week.”

The “huge thing” wasn’t only winning re-election as New Jersey’s governor, but doing it by appealing to a broad range of voters in a very blue state – not just to his conservative base.

But, hey, no harm no foul.  Time isn’t even a newsmagazine anymore.  It became a liberal journal of opinion a long time ago.  So you can just hear those wild and crazy journalists at Time sitting around the conference room table giggling about how they’d get away with their fat joke because, well, in the world of politics,  the word “elephant” isn’t a synonym with “fatso.”

But do you think the gang at Time would ever say Barack Obama is a “dark horse.”  In the world of politics “dark” doesn’t mean “black,” right?

Time’s cover doesn’t necessarily mean that Chris Christie is the GOP frontrunner for 2016.  It’s way too early for that.  But it does help make him the flavor of the month.  […….]

Besides, he’s a favorite of liberal journalists, not only because he’s got a big mouth which makes for some interesting quotes, but also because he’s not the most conservative Republican out there.  For the same reasons they despise Ted Cruz, they adore Chris Christie.  For now.

But if he becomes a serious threat to one of their all-time favs, Hillary Clinton, the so-called mainstream media will turn on Christie with a vengeance.  They hated Goldwater and Reagan while they were alive, painting them as crazy right-wing ideologues.  When they were dead, they became good conservatives – to contrast them with every other conservative who was still breathing.

It’s a good bet Christie will run.  And if he does, he’s charismatic enough to cause the Democrats some sleepless nights.  But Christie’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness.

Christie can win in a deep blue state like New Jersey because he’s not a hard right Tea Party type.  That means he can win the support of women and minorities – crucial to winning a nationwide election.  But the hard right sees him as the latest incarnation of John McCain and Mitt Romney – two moderates who lost.

Chris Christie can attract moderates and independents that would give him a shot in swing states that Republicans must win to take the White House.  He could win Florida and Ohio and North Carolina and Colorado and New Hampshire, and maybe even Iowa and New Mexico.  But he might not be able to win his party’s nomination because it’s conservatives who make up the majority of primary voters, and they – at least as of now – don’t want a Chris Christie.  They want a Ted Cruz or a Rand Paul or some other candidate who can’t win a national election despite what they think.

What the hard right needs to understand is that if they really want change, first they have to win elections.  I know it sounds obvious, but it’s one of those obvious facts the Tea Party never seemed able to grasp.  They picked a bad candidate in Nevada a few years back when a good candidate might have defeated Harry Reid.  And they picked a candidate in Delaware who had to go on TV and tell everyone that she’s not a witch.  She also lost.   [……]

The Tea Party folks are very proud of the fact that they stand on principle.  Bulletin:  so do less hardline Republicans.  But the hard right calls everyone to the left of Ted Cruz a RINO, a Republican in name only.  The Tea Party won’t like this, but the real RINOs are the Tea Party people.  They’ve been very clear that their allegiance is to pure conservatism, not to the Republican Party.  Yes, my right wing friends, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and the others on the far right are the real RINOs.

Because I want Republicans to win, let me offer two pieces of advice.  The first to Chris Christie:

Don’t pick a fight with your own base, the conservatives who at the moment don’t really like you.  As Ross Douthat puts in his New York Times column: “As a would-be nominee, you have to woo base voters, not run against them, and make them feel respected even when they disagree with you.  This doesn’t mean muzzling yourself, or pandering to every right-wing interest group.  

[…….]

In other words, fight the temptation to go along with liberal journalists who believe the GOP is a party of right-wing morons.  Don’t get drawn in by their phony admiration for you.

The second piece of advice is for the Tea Party and other purists on the right.  If it looks like Chris Christie can win, jump on his bandwagon.  Give him your support.  And do you best to be passionate about it. If you don’t, you’ll have up to eight years of Mrs. Clinton.  No matter how you feel about Christie, he’s a lot better than another liberal Democrat, right?

The answer to that last question is obviously yes.  But true believers sometimes don’t think rationally.  I’m cautiously optimistic that Chris Christie could win in 2016 (although cautiously hopeful may come closer to my real feelings).  But I’m pessimistic about his chances of winning the support of his own party.  Fundamentalists – political, religious or any other kind – don’t like to bend.  Sometimes I think they’d rather lose than compromise.  Rush Limbaugh, after all, can barely get the word “compromise” out of his mouth without gagging.  To him, compromise is caving in.  He’s a lot like Barrack Obama in that respect.

And so the real elephants in the room are those purist conservatives who will have to decide how badly they want to win.  It’s still early, but I fear too many of them would rather lose with Ted Cruz than win with Chris Christie.

Read the rest– Be honest: Would you rather win with Chris Christie or lose with Ted Cruz?

 

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Posted in Barry Goldwater, Conservatism, Elections, Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Libertarianism, Mitt Romney, Politics, Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, Tea Parties, The Political Right | 350 Comments »

The MSM: Liberal or unhinged?

by Mojambo ( 326 Comments › )
Filed under Media, Racism at September 4th, 2012 - 6:00 pm

An interesting take on the MSM meltdown during the Republican National Convention. I think the answer is “unhinged”.

by Bernard Goldberg

For a while now I have been worrying about liberals.  Not all of them, of course, just most of them; especially the supposedly smart elite ones.

Some of the things they’ve been saying are more than a little screwy.  So I thought maybe they were going mad.  Now I have second thoughts.  Unfortunately they’re the same as my first thoughts.  Now I’m convinced they’ve lost their minds.

Before we start … a warning:  You may think I made up some of the following examples.  You may think I’m just having some fun at the expense of libs.  Nope.  Everything is real.  You know the old saying (that I just made up):  Out of the mouths of liberals comes some pretty wacky stuff.

First, there’s Old Reliable, Chris Matthews, the man who never lets you down when it comes to giving liberals a bad name.  During the GOP National Convention he suggested that when Republicans link Barack Obama to Chicago politics – (wait for it!) — they’re being racist.

“They keep saying Chicago by the way, have you noticed?” Matthews said on MSNBC, also known as Obama Re-election headquarters.  “They keep saying Chicago.  That’s another thing that sends that message – this guy’s helping the poor people in the bad neighborhoods, screwing us in the ‘burbs.”

[…….]

Get it?  Every time Romney tries to tie Barack Obama to crummy, corrupt Chicago politics, what he’s really doing is appealing to white racist Republicans, the only kind of Republicans there are, in the worldview of many elite liberals.

But if that was a 9.5 on the nutty scale, Matthews MSNBC colleague Lawrence O’Donnell hit the jackpot with a perfect 10.

O’Donnell was on the convention floor, and informed by MSNBC host Martin Bashir that later that evening Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would tell the delegates, “For four years, Barack Obama has been running from the nation’s problems. He hasn’t been working to earn reelection. He’s been working to earn a spot on the PGA tour.”

[…….]

So if you say Barack Obama spends too much time on the golf course and not enough time trying to fix the nation’s problems, that’s the Republican not-so-subtle way of reminding everyone that a) Barack Obama is black – like Tiger Woods – and b) that he has the same “lifestyle” which almost certainly means that the president – like Tiger Woods – fools around with women who aren’t his wife.

Thank you, Lawrence, for that brilliant analysis.  I would have never thought of it.  And neither would anyone else on the entire planet – except for people suffering from CDS – Conservative Derangement Syndrome, a terrible disorder that strikes liberals young and old whenever they come into contact – even through the TV screen – with anyone to the right of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

As Washington Post journalist Jennifer Rubin said on CNN: “MSNBC has to decide if it wants to be liberal or unhinged.”  I think we can agree that MSNBC has already made that decision.

And then there’s the hilarious “joke” from Yahoo! News Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian, who was caught on an open mic during ABCNews.com’s Webcast during the GOP convention.  With a major storm heading for the Louisiana coast while Republicans were having a good time in Tampa, Chalian said Mitt Romney and his wife Ann were “Not concerned at all.  They’re happy to have a party with black people drowning.”

Before you could say “Mitt Romney used to be the Grand Wizard of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan” Chalian was fired.  But is that fair?  After all, he only said what so many other liberals in and out of the media say about Republicans — when chit-chatting among themselves.  Chalian’s crime was saying it out loud into an open microphone.  (He later apologized.)

And you remember Clint Eastwood’s routine with the empty chair.  Bet you didn’t know the lousy bigot was just one more old, white Republican male spewing racism on national television.

Someone called Mike Elk, who is described as a labor journalist, tweeted, “Eastwood chair rant was RACIST, white man putting dirty words into mouth of black man like a puppet.”

[…….]

There’s another old saying (that I did not make up but wish I did): “The only people who see everything through a prism of race are skinheads and liberals.”

Read the rest – They have to decide whether they want to be liberal, or unhinged

 

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Posted in Media, Racism | 326 Comments »

One more to the list of the 100 people who are screwing up America

by Mojambo ( 137 Comments › )
Filed under Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Mitt Romney at January 18th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

Bernard Goldberg thinks (and I agree) that Debbie Wasserman Schultz (aka Debbie Downer) should be on the list on  one of of those helping to screw up America. The thing abut Debbie Downer is that she is so damn unintentionally funny!

by Bernard Goldberg

Back in 2005 I wrote a book called 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America — and Al Franken is #37. It was about the chuckleheads in our culture and politics who were, well, screwing up America.

At number 100 were Paris Hilton’s parents for raising such a twit. Paris was “hot” at the time so I figured, what the heck, and wrote this about her parents: “If they gave Nobel Prizes for the mom and dad who raised the most vapid, empty-headed, inane, hollow, vain, tasteless, self-centered, useless twerp in the entire country — maybe in the entire world — Rich and Kathy Hilton would be on their way to Stockholm to pick up the medal.”

The others who made the list were serious people who were causing real trouble. There was Congresswoman Maxine Waters, at number 47, for her general hatefulness. Bill Moyers made the list, at number 34, after he said — in his oh-so-earnest way — that “right-wing wrecking crews” were out to bankrupt the government in order to enrich the corporate interests, and that, “I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America.” Conservatives were intentionally trying to destroy America? Come on, Bill!

Moyers’ intellectual soul mate, Noam Chomsky, came in at number 11, for his own anti-American brand of intellectualism.

At number two, was a no-brainer: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr, the publisher of the New York Times, which was once a great newspaper — before Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. took over.

And at number one, was our favorite hefty lefty, Michael Moore, who was in the news a lot back then for saying dopey things, like this about his fellow Americans: “They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet…”

If I were updating the book now, in 2012, there’d be a lot of contenders for the list — almost everybody on MSNBC, for example — but no one would deserve to be there more than the new Democratic National Chair … Debbie Wasserman Shultz. She would make the list — maybe even topping it at number one — if for no other reason than she’s breathtakingly obnoxious. Every time she opens her mouth, you have to figure that it’s a vote for some Republican — ANY Republican. What were the Democrats thinking when they picked her as the face and voice of their party? Never mind: these are the same geniuses that picked Nancy Pelosi to speak for the party. By the way, I’m not ruling out the possibility that’s she’s a mole for the GOP, that she’s there because of some really, really cool Republican dirty trick.

We all know that politics isn’t for sissies, that it can get pretty rough. But Ms. Wasserman Shultz is just plain nasty. Take the recent Mitt Romney gaffe. By now we know the dumb remark that Romney made about how he likes to fire people. Yes, he meant he likes to fire insurance companies that aren’t doing their job the way we, the consumer, want them to. Debbie Wasserman Shultz knows exactly what he meant, but that didn’t stop her from saying, “In a shocking and apparent moment of true honesty, Mitt Romney said, ‘I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.’ That’s precisely the approach he took at Bain where his business model was to put profits over people.”

[……]

Just the other day, she linked the Tea Party to the 2011 massacre in Tucson — despite the fact that the shooter, Jared Lougner, is so crazy that a judge has ruled him unfit to stand trial. There’s not a shred of evidence that he ever went to a Tea Party rally or that he even knew what the Tea Party is. That didn’t stop Debbie Wasserman Shultz from saying:

“We need to make sure that we tone things down, particularly in light of the Tucson tragedy from a year ago, where my very good friend, Gabby Giffords [was shot]. …The discourse in America, the discourse in Congress in particular . . . has really changed, I’ll tell you. I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it took a very precipitous turn towards edginess and lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement.”

Nice touch, Deb … saying “I hesitate to place blame” … right before you place blame.

JWR contributor Jonathan S. Tobin nailed the Wasserman Shultz hypocrisy in a piece on the Commentary magazine Web site:

“Many liberals initially tried to blame the Tea Party or Sarah Palin or anybody else they could think of on the right for the shooting. But once it was established that the perpetrator was an apolitical lunatic, they quickly dropped that ploy though few, if any, apologized. It takes a special kind of chutzpah to dredge this nastiness up a year later and to do it while calling for more civility in politics.”

That’s not the only time she used the Tucson tragedy to score political points. Once she actually dragged her 11-year old daughter into the mud, alleging that the young girl said things I’m not at all sure she really said. “After my daughter heard that, you know, Gabby had been shot, the first thing she asked me was, you know, ‘Mommy, are you gonna get shot? Does that mean you’re going to get shot?'” After Wasserman Shultz supposedly said, “No, of course Mommy will be O.K,” her daughter supposedly said, “But Mommy, Florida’s going to pass an immigration law like Arizona and then people are going to be mad at you.”

Really? An 11-year old girl said, “Florida’s going to pass an immigration law like Arizona ….” Maybe. But I don’t believe it.

And when Republican Congressman Paul Ryan came out with his plan to control government spending, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was at it again.

“We see a clear attempt for the government to back out of its commitment to seniors,” she said. “As a result, many seniors in America will be forced into poverty, and worse. Some seniors will end up dying because they are forced to put off getting that pain checked out due to huge out-of-pocket costs that will skyrocket for them. … This plan would literally be a death trap for some seniors.”

[…..]

You know who else should be on an updated 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America? Debbie Wasserman Shultz’ parents — for raising Debbie Wasserman Shultz. All Paris Hilton’s parents did was raise a twit. The Shultzes raised an attack dog who gives politics a bad name.

But I’m still not ruling out the possibility that she might be a Republican dirty trick.

[…..]

Read the rest – A new entry for 100 people who are screwing up America

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Posted in Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Mitt Romney | 137 Comments »