Month: August 2012

Goldblog provides a transcript.

Zack Beauchamp contemplates Clint's performance:

The qualities that make effective art are the opposites of the ones that make a good campaign spectacle. Art, even (or especially) when it’s political, succeeds by simultaneously entertaining the audience and opening up new avenues for thought. Art that attempts to lecture at you generally fails as art because it forgets what it’s best at doing. Campaign events, by contrast, are about selling one particular narrative as persuasively as possible. You’re supposed to come away from a campaign event or convention convinced that a particular candidate is Best For America, inspired to work for their campaign. It’s about getting you on a team, not getting you to laugh or think. Even humor deployed in a campaign event is carefully crafted to serve the event’s overall message rather than be comedy qua comedy. Political spectacle, while perhaps an art form, isn’t art.

Kornacki asks how Romney's staff allowed the Eastwood speech to happen:

In theory, Eastwood wouldn’t make a bad primetime convention speaker, but there’s no evidence that the Romney team did anything other than take an 82-year-old man with no experience delivering nationally televised political speeches at his word that he’d be able to handle a few minutes of primetime by himself, no help needed with any preparations. Nor is there any sign that anyone in the campaign asked him why he needed a chair.

Jesse Walker, on the other hand, argues that Eastwood had the "best speech of the week":

Eastwood's criticisms of Barack Obama were the average American's criticisms of Barack Obama. If you want to hammer the president in a way that appeals to undecideds, you couldn't do much better than to complain about high unemployment and an endless war. That won't sound authentic coming from Romney, who has been tagged, fairly or not, as the guy who likes to fire people, and whose position on Afghanistan is 180 degrees away from Eastwood's. But coming from Clint Eastwood, that isn't a big problem…

Jesse may be right. But I suspect the weirdness of that chair eclipsed anything else of any interest. By the way, readers continue to keep the Dish sane:

Repeal Obamachair!

(Image via Invisible Obama)

Frum goes another few rounds arguing that Romney would be less hawkish than Obama. David's first argument is that "Iran confrontation is not driven by Sheldon Adelson, or by Israel, or by some Israel Lobby." I didn't say the Iran confrontation was driven by Adelson. But it sure is a major reason he has bankrolled the candidates. But the idea that AIPAC – and the entire Greater Israel lobby – is not chomping at the bit to invade and bomb Iran is surreal. They live for it.

And the Christianist base has been whipped into a frenzy about the evil and mighty threat of Iran. Would Romney – after all this rhetoric – be able to allow Iran to enrich uranium past Netanyahu's red line (which has already been crossed)? Obama's in a tough enough spot, potentially cornered into war by his own statements. But Romney has said there will be "no daylight" between Israel and America if he becomes president. And we know what Romney's old buddy, Netanyahu, wants.

David's second argument:

If elected … here's the briefing Romney will face:

He'll be told that Iranian nuclear sites are hardened and distributed. He'll be told that a bombing campaign will have to be intense and sustained. He'll be briefed on the risks of Iranian retaliation, and he will be offered a menu of options to pre-empt such retaliation. The menu will include such measures as attacks on Iranian Revolutionary Guard barracks and facilities. He'll be warned that by striking at the regime's repressive apparatus, he'll be risking a breakdown in regime control. In such a case, steps will have to be taken to secure Iran's existing nuclear materials, steps that could range all the way up to deployment of peacekeeping forces – that last a very large-scale undertaking.

When he gets this briefing, Romney will think, "Iraq." He'll think, "There goes all the rest of my agenda." He'll think, "I'll need cross-party support, which means I'll need to make concessions to Democrats on their domestic issues. Goodbye tax cut. Goodbye entitlements reform." He'll think, "Oil prices will rise, and possibly interest rates too, choking off economic recovery."

No, he won't. He'll just talk about a new "axis of evil," if David will pardon the impression, and make sure his invasion is meticulously planned. And David seems to think Romney wants to cut defense spending. No, he doesn't. What's that money for if not another neocon war? He adds:

Romney will have no escape from the realization: an Iran strike bets his presidency and at least postpones and probably voids his domestic agenda. It's not impossible he'll still say yes. It's just deeply implausible.

My view: romney is a weak man who believes reflexively in an-always aggressive America. And he will do what his neocon advisers tell him. At the very least we can say this. The choice is between a president who will clearly do all he can to avoid war and a candidate who has already effectively pledged to do whatever Israel's right-wing asks.

Earlier debate here.

(Photos: Adelson and Cheney from Getty.)

From Marc Tracy's profile:

BuzzFeed has actually pulled off a neat trick. In recent years, the ascension of a new media company has typically been greeted by a lot of hand-wringing about the place’s ideology and how politics are growing increasingly partisan. People worry that one side will get all their news from Matt Drudge and Glenn Beck, and the other will retreat to some sort of Daily Kos-ian alternate reality, and never the twain shall meet.

But BuzzFeed makes those arguments seem kind of quaint.

True to its DNA, it mixes The Huffington Post’s populism with Politico’s obsession with the game to produce an endless stream of scooplets devoid of context or deep meaning. Every subject gets flattened, and politics, cats, lists, scoops, and jokes are all treated the same. It’s the reductio ad absurdum of political journalism, and, in Smith’s and Peretti’s minds, it’s exactly what people want. 

(Image of meat portraits by Jim Mercier, via Buzzfeed's Mark Duffy, "Because … who cares about the issues?")

#Romney makes global warming joke during warmest year on modern record #GOP2012 #Nbcpolitics — Luke Russert (@LukeRussert) August 31, 2012

Despite narrowly avoiding the impact of Hurricane Isaac, the Republicans in Tampa either ignored climate change or flat-out mocked it. Here’s what else the party has ignored:

The thunderstorm and tornado swarms of early 2011, including the monstrous Joplin, Mo., disaster. Hurricane Irene, which inundated much of the Northeast. The worst heat wave in Russia in 1,000 years. Record-shattering heat and drought in much of the United States this year. The lowest level of Arctic sea ice ever measured. The melting of virtually the entire ice sheet of Greenland, something not seen in 30 years of satellite measurements.

And yet climate change is barely a blip on the political radar in this year’s campaign. The topic appears in the Republican convention platform only in one passage berating the Obama administration for elevating climate change to a “‘severe threat’ equivalent to foreign aggression.”

Brad Plumer shows how extreme the party has become by comparing this year’s platform to 2008’s:

The 2008 GOP platform certainly didn’t agree with liberals and environmentalists on everything. Far from it.

The document put a heavy emphasis on nuclear power, which tends to cause some green groups to bristle (although many Democrats softened their opposition to atomic energy in the years that followed, in a failed effort to woo conservatives on climate policy). The platform also had harsh words for “doomsday climate change scenarios” and “no-growth radicalism.” Yet the 2008 GOP platform was, essentially, taking part in a debate over how best to tackle greenhouse gases—not about whether the climate was changing at all.

Skip ahead to 2012, and the GOP platform takes a markedly different tone. That section devoted to climate change? Gone. Instead, the platform flatly opposes “any and all cap and trade legislation” to curtail greenhouse gases.

Phillip Bump has more on Romney’s rising oceans joke:

This election will be close and fiercely fought. Romney’s comment wasn’t about an issue of substance. … It was about making an earnest claim from a political candidate into a cynical joke — about diminishing a critical problem in order to add another two points to the scoreboard. That’s a terrible precedent for a candidate who might someday need to defend his office. Even more, it’s a horrendous idea for a man who would need, if elected, to lead a nation that must prepare for the most disruptive transition in its history.

Your Dish selection of tweets and photos here, in case you missed it.

One small point about Clint's riff on Gitmo and the trial of terrorists. Why would Clint Eastwood of all people be so afraid of trying a mass-murdering Jihadist in New York City? Why would he be so terrified of incarcerating prisoners of war on American soil, proper? Is he quaking in his cowboy boots because the evil terrorists might try to strike?

The thing about modern Republican courage is that it is actually fear.

A reader writes:

Why feature Clint Eastwood? Because Ronald Reagan's dead and they wanted to make this connection:

I have my veto pen drawn and ready for any tax increase that Congress might even think of sending up. And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers. Go ahead–make my day.

That was Reagan at the American Business Conference. Focusing on Reagan allows the Republican party to ignore the GWB years.  And it might have worked except for the fact that Clint Eastwood has never been a good public speaker.  (However strange his performance tonight, it's not far off from any appearance he's made on a talk show or when accepting an award.)

Of course it could simply be that he's a huge star and not many have already endorsed Romney. Another reader offers a "much darker interpretation":

Like most viewers I thought Clint's presentation was odd, sad, laughable, incongruous. Somehow this was a moment that just didn't work out. But it was President Obama's response tweet that got me thinking at a much deeper level.

Obama responds with a picture of himself sitting in his chair in the Oval Office, back turned to the viewer, saying, "This chair is taken." Directly to Romney, terse and defiant. Why did Obama respond to that moment, Clint's strange rambling off-topic schtick? Isn't Obama too smart to respond? But Obama's response was so pointed, so potent. Clearly something needed to be addressed.

So I went back to the whole Clint Eastwood stunt and re-watched it a few times with a critical eye. Here's what I come up with: that was an intentional act of imagined violence against President Obama at a deep, semiotic level of American mythos. Take the optics: Clint comes out under a huge backdrop of the Western gunslinger. He starts a monologue vs. "the punk." (Do you feel lucky, punk? Well do you?) The punk, the empty chair, the empty suit, responds by telling Romney, "Go fuck yourself." Clint scolds Obama and leads the crowd in a chant, "Go ahead. Make my day." At which point, as we all know, offstage, Clint would then shoot the punk and kill him. This was a very public, very imaginative enactment of violence against the sitting President of the US.

Oh, please. Take a deep breath and see a moment that will make Jon Stewart's year. It was improv. By the way, a visual reminder of the origin of "Do you feel lucky, punk?":

And "Make my day":

Hanna Rosin has a new book out, The End Of Men. The NYT Magazine this Sunday has an adapted excerpt:

While millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost over the last decade, jobs in health, education and services have been added in about the same numbers. The job categories projected to grow over the next decade include nursing, home health care and child care. Of the 15 categories projected to grow the fastest by 2016 — among them sales, teaching, accounting, custodial services and customer service — 12 are dominated by women. These are not necessarily the most desirable or highest-paying jobs. But they do provide a reliable source of employment and a ladder up to the middle class. It used to be that in working-class America, men earned significantly more than women. Now in that segment of the population, the gap between men and women is shrinking faster than in any other, according to June Carbone, an author of “Red Families v. Blue Families.”

Previous videos of Hanna here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

‘You Did Great!’ Terrified Personal Assistant Tells Clint Eastwood onion.com/Ugs6TI

— The Onion (@TheOnion) August 31, 2012

That can’t be good for Romney, can it? You know it’s bad when Byron York is forced to say this:

It’s an open question why such a carefully run campaign chose to feature improv at the beginning of the 10 p.m.

Not since Admiral Stockdale …