The Real October Surprise

[miles]

 

[Ham Murabi]

I asked one of the office libs why he didn't like Romney. He gave me a strange look and said he was going to vote for him.
For the life of me, I can't understand why Romney would be shunned by Democrats. You listen to the debate and every solution Obama offered was a government program. Even the most die-hard liberal has to understand we can't afford more trickle-down government.

 

[Sean Renaud]

That's pretty funny miles.

Ham, you can't figure out why libs would shun Romney? He's spent 18 months dressing up as Snidely Whiplash and convincing people who don't know much about the man that he's literally kicking puppies for fun.

What's funny here is that Republicans aren't outright flipping the fuck out that Romney just lifted the veil and revealed he's not a Conservative.

 

[garbage can]

I asked one of the office libs why he didn't like Romney. He gave me a strange look and said he was going to vote for him.
For the life of me, I can't understand why Romney would be shunned by Democrats. You listen to the debate and every solution Obama offered was a government program. Even the most die-hard liberal has to understand we can't afford more trickle-down government.

All Obama's solutions are government "investments".

Obama wants to raise revenue by taxing the rich.
He seems to be unaware that raising revenue by creating jobs is not a bad idea.

 

[RobDownSouth]

All Obama's solutions are government "investments".

Obama wants to raise revenue by taxing the rich.
He seems to be unaware that raising revenue by creating jobs is not a bad idea.

Some day you'll say something original, as opposed to regurgitating tired hackneyed Rapepublican talking points.

When that day comes, we'll all stand and cheer.

Today, however, does not seem to be that day.

 

[garbage can]

That's pretty funny miles.

Ham, you can't figure out why libs would shun Romney? He's spent 18 months dressing up as Snidely Whiplash and convincing people who don't know much about the man that he's literally kicking puppies for fun.

What's funny here is that Republicans aren't outright flipping the fuck out that Romney just lifted the veil and revealed he's not a Conservative.

I think most people who are reasonably interested in politics know that Romney is not a conservative.

 

[islandman]

That TV sure looks nicer than the one he had just four years ago.

Just sayin'.

 

[garbage can]

Some day you'll say something original, as opposed to regurgitating tired hackneyed Rapepublican talking points.

When that day comes, we'll all stand and cheer.

Today, however, does not seem to be that day.

Brilliant... you're on top of your game today.

 

[Sean Renaud]

I think most people who are reasonably interested in politics know that Romney is not a conservative.

What percent, even amongst likely voters, do you think are "reasonably" interested in politics. For the sake of this conversation I'm going to say you're not reasonally interested if your information on the candidates is limited to what been said in the debates, ads and major news stories.

 

[Ham Murabi]

That's pretty funny miles.

Ham, you can't figure out why libs would shun Romney? He's spent 18 months dressing up as Snidely Whiplash and convincing people who don't know much about the man that he's literally kicking puppies for fun.

What's funny here is that Republicans aren't outright flipping the fuck out that Romney just lifted the veil and revealed he's not a Conservative.

Not a conservative? My God, the depth of your wisdom is astonishing.
Maybe that's why I can't figure out why more Democrats haven't flocked to him. Romney is not a conservative and the idiot in the White House is destroying the economy.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Not a conservative? My God, the depth of your wisdom is astonishing.
Maybe that's why I can't figure out why more Democrats haven't flocked to him. Romney is not a conservative and the idiot in the White House is destroying the economy.

He's been presenting himself as a conservative for an entire year. Do you think everybody pays close attention to a man's actions and not his words or looked into his background? Your making the mistake of thinking America puts as much effort into electing it's President as it does the winner of American Idol. It doesn't.

More Democrats aren't flocking to him for a few reasons. First I believe the majority of Americans don't pay much attention to politics. They believe Romney is who he's been pretending to be. Which frankly reflects poorly on the Republicans that he felt the need to lie to get nominated and worse on Conservatives who could have abandoned him and simply said fuck it you idiots deserve what you get.

There is no idiot in the White House and the economy is improving month by month. There is no denying it, no escaping that fact. People know that and it's questionable why you'd want to change from a plan that's working, just slower than we'd like to an unknown plan by a man who won't explain it. It's not really all that complicated.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I think this pretending meme is a bit of a canard.

The man pretending to be something he is not has difficulty in clearly articulating his goals, plans and aims. The only one who suffered that fate was the President who has to work very hard not to let slip his Social Justice rhetoric as he struggles for one last month to pretend that he is some sort of centrist, new-age, manager of Capitalism.

 

[rosco rathbone]

The electoral sweet spot is what you might call the "renard ruse voter". Anti-elitist, anti-government, anti-Wall Street, doesn't give a damn if the rich have to pay higher taxes, pro-Social Security and Medicare for the deserving. Dislike Obama as a snooty liberal, but not Ayn Rand fans either. George Wallace voters. Reagan Democrats. With his debate performance it seems that Romney may be catching on to this, which is good news for establishment GOP.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Not so much for our pal Gary...




I think he wins points with his working with an 87% Democrat legislature to get things done with that Reagan branch that you reference.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Not a conservative? My God, the depth of your wisdom is astonishing.
Maybe that's why I can't figure out why more Democrats haven't flocked to him. Romney is not a conservative and the idiot in the White House is destroying the economy.

In the Western world, since the late 18th century, the bourgeoisie describes a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital, and their related culture" .

Mitt is bourgeois. That is, he avoids controversy and whatever harms his commerce. The bourgeois arent pedigreed Conservatives. Real Conservatives wanna preserve and foster what works best, based on historical performance and results, and standards. Its the spring for conservation. National Parks and art galleries are Conservative preserves (public toilets are Liberal habitat). But your bourgeois Neo-Con is only interested in preserving what helps his sales and profits.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Sesame Nation
Mark Steyn, NRO
October 6, 2012

Apparently, Frank Sinatra served as Mitt Romney’s debate coach. As he put it about halfway through “That’s Life”:

“I’d jump right on a big bird and then I’d fly . . . ”

That’s what Mitt did in Denver. Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off — and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator. Yet that’s what the killer Mormon did when he declared that he wasn’t going to borrow money from China to pay for Jim Lehrer and Big Bird on PBS. It was a terrific alpha-male moment, not just in that it rattled Lehrer, who seemed too preoccupied contemplating a future reading the hog prices on the WZZZ Farm Report to regain his grip on the usual absurd format, but in the sense that it indicated a man entirely at ease with himself — in contrast to wossname, the listless sourpuss staring at his shoes.

...

Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood — the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum and it’s no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their “safe house” in Benghazi. Or as J. Scott Gration, the president’s special envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries — they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes . . . ” The butchers of Darfur aren’t blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven’t given enough cookies. I’m not saying there’s a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary . . . well, actually I am.

Okay, I may be taking this further than Mitt intended. So let’s go back to his central thrust. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives nearly half a billion dollars a year from taxpayers, which it disburses to PBS stations, who in turn disburse it to Big Bird and Jim Lehrer. I don’t know what Big Bird gets, but, according to Senator Jim DeMint, the president of Sesame Workshop, Gary Knell, received in 2008 a salary of $956,513. In that sense, Big Bird and Senator Harry Reid embody the same mystifying phenomenon: They’ve been in “public service” their entire lives and have somehow wound up as multimillionaires.

Mitt’s decision to strap Big Bird to the roof of his station wagon and drive him to Canada has prompted two counterarguments from Democrats: (1) Half a billion dollars is a mere rounding error in the great sucking maw of the federal budget, so why bother? (2) Everybody loves Sesame Street, so Mitt is making a catastrophic strategic error. On the latter point, whether or not everybody loves Sesame Street, everybody has seen it, and every American under 50 has been weaned on it. So far this century it’s sold nigh on a billion bucks’ worth of merchandising sales (that’s popular toys such as the Subsidize-Me-Elmo doll). If Sesame Street is not commercially viable, then nothing is, and we should just cut to the chase and bail out everything.

Conversely, if this supposed “public” broadcasting brand is capable of standing on its own, then so should it. As for the rest of PBS’s output — the eternal replays of the Peter, Paul & Mary reunion concert, twee Brit sitcoms, Lawrence Welk reruns and therapeutic infomercials — whatever their charms, it is difficult to see why the Brokest Nation in History should be borrowing money from the Chinese Politburo to pay for it. A system by which a Communist party official in Beijing enriches British comedy producers by charging it to American taxpayers with interest is not the most obvious economic model. Yet, as Obama would say, the government did build that.

...

The queen of the Netherlands flies commercial, so does the queen of Denmark. Prince William and his lovely bride, whom at least as many people want to get a piece of as Valerie Jarrett or Leon Panetta, flew to Los Angeles on a Royal Canadian Air Force boneshaker. It is profoundly unrepublican when minor public officials assume that private planes and entourages to hold the masses at bay are a standard perk of office. And it is even more disturbing that tens of millions of Americans are accepting of this. The entitlements are complicated, and will take some years and much negotiation. But, in a Romney administration, rolling back the nickel’n’dime stuff — i.e., the million’n’billion stuff — should start on Day One.

Mitt made much of his bipartisan credentials in Denver. So, in that reach-across-the-aisle spirit, if we cannot abolish entirely frivolous spending, might we not at least attempt some economies of scale? Could Elmo, Grover, Oscar, and Cookie Monster not be redeployed as Intergovernmental Engagement Assistant Jarrett’s security detail? Could Leon Panetta not fly home on Big Bird every weekend?

And for the next debate, instead of a candidate slumped at the lectern like a muppet whose puppeteer has gone out for a smoke, maybe Elmo’s guy could shove his arm up the back of the presidential suit.

 

[Liar]

I think most people who are reasonably interested in politics know that Romney is not a conservative.

So, what do they, and you, make of statements like this?

"I was a severely conservative Republican governor" - Mitt Romney

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

So, what do they, and you, make of statements like this?

"I was a severely conservative Republican governor" - Mitt Romney

In The People's State of Massachusetts, he WAS. comparatively, "a severely conservative Republican governor..."


... Think Nanny Bloomberg.

 

[Liar]

The electoral sweet spot is what you might call the "renard ruse voter". Anti-elitist, anti-government, anti-Wall Street, doesn't give a damn if the rich have to pay higher taxes, pro-Social Security and Medicare for the deserving. Dislike Obama as a snooty liberal, but not Ayn Rand fans either. George Wallace voters. Reagan Democrats. With his debate performance it seems that Romney may be catching on to this, which is good news for establishment GOP.

It'll be interresting to see how much he dares pivot towards that before the right side wheels of the Romneybus flies off.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

So, what do they, and you, make of statements like this?

"I was a severely conservative Republican governor" - Mitt Romney

After spending a few years in fascist Spain I believed I was Liberal, and then my real Liberal friends made me see the error of my thinking.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

After spending a few years in fascist Spain I believed I was Liberal, and then my real Liberal friends made me see the error of my thinking.

“Like most of her neighborhood, she was a fighting liberal, fighting to have her money taken from her. For all her exertions, it never was.”
John Updike

 

[Liar]

In The People's State of Massachusetts, he WAS. comparatively, "a severely conservative Republican governor..."


... Think Nanny Bloomberg.

I have the wealth of Bill Gates, the genius of Beethoven and the body of a Greek god.

comparatively

 

[rosco rathbone]

It'll be interresting to see how much he dares pivot towards that before the right side wheels of the Romneybus flies off.

I dunno. I think with their backs to the wall, they'll be forgiving of political expediency....if he wins. If he loses, his center turn will be blamed.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I have the wealth of Bill Gates, the genius of Beethoven and the body of a Greek god.

comparatively

You left out the moves like Jagger...

 

[Liar]

You left out the moves like Jagger...

Jagger ain't got moves like mine.