Month: March 2012

"Constitutional principles seem to be mere inconveniences to Mr. Obama," – John Yoo and John Bolton, NYT.

Rasmussen now shows a three-way tie heading into Tuesday's primary (Gingrich 30%, Santorum 29%, Romney 28%). Ed Morrissey hypes the race: 

It’s been conventional wisdom that Gingrich has to win both Alabama and Mississippi in order to continue in the race.  If Romney wins Alabama, though, it might be enough to make a case that neither Santorum or Gingrich has much reason to continue.

Philip Klein has similar thoughts: 

Romney has done consistently poorly among evangelical voters, who made up 77 percent of the electorate in the 2008 Alabama GOP primary. That year, Mike Huckabee edged out John McCain and Romney finished a distant third with 18 percent of the vote. If he wins there this time around, it will bolster his case that he's the inevitable nominee and Gingrich and Santorum will start to face pressure to drop out. The poll suggests that Romney is not only continuing to benefit from conservatives' indecision about rallying around an alternative, but that perhaps he's starting to benefit from a "rally around the nominee" effect, which hasn't done much for him through this point in the race.

Pareene reviews Game Change, which premieres tomorrow:

The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to "unfair" — Sarah Palin doesn’t know that the head of Great Britain’s government is the prime minister, not the queen — are basically plausible. This isn’t Andrew Sullivan’s conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It’s an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are explained by a crash diet. 

Anyone with even the faintest grasp of Palin's reality – including former close aides like Frank Bailey – understands that she is emotionally unstable, paranoid, vindictive, self-destructive, religiously fanatical and clinically deluded. Her "wonderful mothering" led her to take a tiny child with Down Syndrome and parade him in front of the cameras as a political prop, and later hauling him out half-naked at night to show off to fans on her book tour. None of her children has made it to college; one was a teenage vandal, another a teen mom. A man who lived in her house, says her children had to raise themselves. She quit office in mid-term because her vanity and rapacity were more important to her than public service. The victims of her vicious career lie strewn all over Alaska. Anyone faintly aware of reality also knows that John McCain was as cynical, brutal and expedient a figure as anyone to run for president – and that Palin's selection was an act of such grotesque vanity and cynicism that it instantly disqualified him from the presidency.

I suspect the real truth about how this deranged, comic, vicious ignoramus nearly became a heartbeat away from the presidency will only be absorbed in the future, when we are not so close to the embarrassment.

Liberals are restrained from really laying out the truth for fear of further attacks from the Palinite right. Establishment conservatives cannot bring themselves to understand what they did – although Steve Schmidt has admirably copped to intense and abiding remorse for his part in the process. The far right, which Palin helped bring to further heights of lunacy, has continued to debase any prospect of a sane two-party system in the US. Palin's legacy lives on to damage the country.

Of course, Game Change was not The Rogue. And Hollywood is neither. The truth was far more interesting and infinitely darker.

Harry Enten challenges my view that Romney will have a real problem with conservatives in the general:

Have a look at the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, in which 89% of Republican primary voters said they would vote for Romney. In fact, the percentage who said they would vote for Romney enthusiastically is actually up 7 percentage points since October, albeit that it is still very low at 45%. This compares with only 81% of Republican primary voters saying they would for Rick Santorum, of which only 42% would do so enthusiastically. This 89% Republican support is right around the percentage that George W Bush won in 2000 and 2004. 

Those are impressive numbers. My issue is with turnout, and with the evangelical Mormon issue. Romney's best bet with those is Israel and Obama-hatred. I have no doubt he will run the most negative and dishonest anti-incumbent campaign I've seen in my adult lifetime.

Christopher Preble takes a close look at Romney's promise to spend "at least 4 percent of GDP on the military’s base budget":

Romney’s 4 percent gimmick would result in taxpayers spending more than twice as much on the Pentagon as in 2000 (111 percent higher, to be precise) and 45 percent more than in 1985, the height of the Reagan buildup. Over the next ten years, Romney’s annual spending (in constant dollars) for the Pentagon would average 64 percent higher than annual post–Cold War budgets (1990-2012), and 42 percent more than the average during the Reagan era (1981-1989). Mitt Romney may genuinely believe that today’s enemies are 42 percent more frightening than the big bad Soviets. He might believe that spending an average of $450 billion (in constant dollars) every year since 1990 has left the country dangerously vulnerable. If that is true, he should say so. 

Larison comments on Mitt's foreign policy predicament: 

Romney has now trapped himself by opposing himself to this imaginary Obama of “apology tours,” rejection of American exceptionalism, and appeasement, and he has tied himself to this thoroughly false portrayal of Obama for so long that it would be difficult for him to stop and to start grounding his attacks in facts.

His entire candidacy is built on various fantasies dictated by his unhinged party's base. What's truly staggering to me is that at no time during the discussion about Iran has the question of Iraq been raised by these trigger-happy war-mongers. And Mitt "I'd Double Gitmo!" Romney is supposed to be the guy who knows how to manage things.

Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, just bought The New Republic, becoming both its publisher and editor-in-chief:

The latter title is significant. Martin Peretz bought the magazine in 1974 and assumed the title, and took a direct hand in running the editorial operations, with mixed but fascinating results. Subsequent owners have taken financial responsibility, but none adopted the Editor-in-Chief title, which implies a higher level of commitment. The Editor remains Richard Just, but Hughes is clearly indicating he's in the magazine for the long haul.

It couldn't have come at a better time:

The publication has cut back both advertising pages and publication dates in the last several years, (the long-time weekly is now printed biweekly) and struggled to find its footing with a semi-paid online model. In a letter published on the magazine's website this morning, Hughes reiterated his commitment to the TNR's mission, which 98 years after its founding remains an "experiment" in thoughtful, yet entertaining long form journalism. Fortunately, Hughes — who is worth $700 million according to Forbes — can afford to tinker in the lab for awhile.

I couldn't be happier, as a former editor. A completely fresh start with an owner who gets new media and wants to support good long-form journalism is a fantastic way for the magazine to approach its centenary. I wonder, however, how Leon Wieseltier will respond. His section of TNR has run countless, endless screeds against all forms of new media, a brutal hostility to blogs, and a contempt for virtual reading (his latest piece is a screed in defense of physical books). The latest cover is another essay by his latest darling, Evgeny Morozov, on the same lines.

Now he will answer to a Facebook multimillionaire!

Battery Park City, New York, 9.42 am

Nate Silver runs through various scenarios. Even in the scenario pictured above, where Santorum runs ten points better than his baseline numbers, he would fall short of a delegate majority:

Mr. Santorum’s path to the nomination probably involves generating some real momentum by sweeping just about everything in March — other than perhaps Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the territorial caucuses. If he won Illinois on March 20, for instance, and then followed it up with an April 3 result in which he won Wisconsin clearly and if Maryland was close, that’s about the point in which Mr. Romney would be in extreme danger. It’s not impossible, but Mr. Santorum has a very high bar to clear.

Stephen Hough shows how the meaning of marriage has evolved even in the Catholic Church:

The Church altered its teaching from the mid-20th century onwards away from the traditional 'procreation first, relationship second' to an equal billing for the two. Pope John Paul II was a key thinker in this shift of official opinion when he was still a mere priest teaching in Poland – a hundred years ago he would have been considered a heretic for his views. But people now, at least in the West, primarily choose their partners based on love, companionship and compatibility.

Alex Massie expands on those changes:

Indeed in many respects gay marriage has more in common with heterosexual marriage now than contemporary heterosexual marriages do with nineteenth century heterosexual marriages. Changing societal norms have seen to that. Women are no longer viewed as property; they have agency themselves. This, in many ways, is just as great a change in the definition and practice of marriage as anything proposed by campaigners for gay marriage. Indeed, one could argue that given the percentage of the population affected by these changes, the twentieth century's evolving understanding of hetereosexual marriage marked a much greater change than anything proposed now.

(Image: "(Ipswich)" from Eric Standley's series Either/ Or Decreed of cut paper sculptures)