Last September during one of the GOP debates the crowd gave the loudest cheer of the night for Rick Perry at the mention of his record number of executions. Yee doogie.
– Look whether you are for or against the death penalty you don’t cheer it like a *&^^%$% overtime game winning field goal. (Unless you are Billy Cundiff).
Want to take a guess at the percentage of people at that debate that would classify themselves as Christians?
I guess that would be the "eye for an eye" Christians (Old school). Luckily we do have the New age JC followers - he overruled the old man with "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I tell you whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also." Thank God eh? We could use a few more of them at the debates.
But I had better be careful here as I am walking on thin ice. Not my expertise and I digress.
Newt Gingrich says he won’t “allow” the moderators of future GOP presidential debates to keep the crowd out of it.
No noise - No Newt – REALLY? When did crowd participation become an integral part of presidential debates???
I went back and at looked at the video of the first televised presidential debate – 1960 Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. I didn’t hear any hooting and hollering – nobody yelling “Git er done or hang him, or you’re the man Tiger”. What the hell – Walter Cronkite would have gone all Dan Rather on 'em.
The debate is …. well it’s a debate, not a talk show or MMA match. Come on! That’s why I didn’t run for class president in high school. Running against the hot shot quarterback - I would have looked like John King after he opened the debate with that question for Newt about his second wife's claims against him. Man - Newt jumped up the corner turnbuckle, walked on the top rope and jumped down on King's chest, knocking the wind out of him and whipping the crowd into a frenzy.
Now, should King have led off with that question – I don’t think so. Was it worth asking – I don’t know but…….
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| Gingrich performs the Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka on an unsuspecting John King |
Newt was appalled and the dogs were let loose – and Mitt was cooked. Listen to the video and hear the crowd chant, hoot and holler. Newt has been masterful at whipping the crowd up and feigning shock at the depravity the media is capable of sinking to (not a bad play for a serial cheater who was reprimanded when he served as the House Speaker. He was ordered to pay an unprecedented $300,000 penalty; the first time in the House's 208-year history it has disciplined a speaker for ethical wrongdoing.) But Newt’s double barrel blast of the media contributed to his come from behind victory in South Carolina over a gob-smacked Romney.
In the Florida debate that followed the audience was not allowed to spontaneously channel a box car of hillbillies and Romney (in debate style) carved up Newt who looked lost without his cheerleaders.
Following that debacle Gingrich took the opportunity to blast the media.
“I wish in retrospect I had protested when Brian Williams took [the crowd] out of it because I think it’s wrong,” he said. “I think he took them out of it because the media is terrified that the audience is going to side with the candidates against the media, which is what they’ve done in every debate.”
The crowd was asked to hold their applause until the breaks, and moderator Brian Williams did not pull a "John King". Newt didn’t get the Springer-bounce from his supporters as he did in S.C. He was lost.
“We’re going to serve notice on future debates that we won’t tolerate — we’re just not going to allow that to happen,” Gingrich continued. “That’s wrong — the media doesn’t control free speech. People ought to be able to applaud if they want to. It was almost silly.” Free Speech huh? Ever see anyone start yelling critica l things at presidential candidates?
How about we go retro on this and everyone shut their pie hole – Maybe it won’t be exciting but we have plenty of other outlets for that behavior – like executions.
So what happens if Newt becomes president – imagine he’s on the phone with the Russian Prime Minister who is kicking Newt’s ass like nobody’s business. Gingrich feeling he needs to feed off the energy of his followers snaps his fingers and into the oval office walks the South Carolina audience (now working as Newt’s private full time entourage). Newt now energized jumps up on the table and metamorphoses into a woman guest of Jerry Springer show telling Vladimir Putin
"OH NO YOU DI-INT!!!!!”
This posting eminds me of the comdeian Dennis Miller... "A bit of a rant"
ReplyDeleteBut while you are on the rant, remember it was Newt, after all... what did you expect? He is a master manipulator... ask wife 1 and 2... ask anyone who has served with him... Newt was playing to the lowest common denominator in the audience... On that I agree....
I would select to a write in vote for Donald Duck before I voted for Obama this time... but if Newt is the other nominee... then... well, I'll still have to write in for Donald Duck...
As for Rick Perry..... he got what he deserved...
I haven’t actually watched any complete debates, just YouTubed some of them here and there. I can’t stand Newtie, Santorum deserves his Google search, Ron Paul is often the sanest sounding one – kind of like saying Hirohito was the sanest one in the Axis, and while I think I could probably live with Romney it is clear that in the push to become prez he has forgotten who in the hell he is. What I’m finding interesting is how, given the nature of the Rep nomination process, they can, with a straight face, talk about how Obama is trying to divide the country. WTF? Now, I don’t think any of this is actually unusual in a historic sense – in the first contested election in 1800 one of the major arguments for Adams was that Jefferson did not believe in God. There were duels fought, people killed, and the Civil War. But why have we not learned a fucking thing? Why, given the problems that we face, are we still doing the same stupid stuff we did 200 years ago? Instead of reasoned debate we have a circus funded by billionaires. The other thing I find interesting is how the South is driving the debate about stuff, just like 200 years ago. States with highest divorce rates, lowest education rates, and lowest wages are setting the agenda.
ReplyDeleteWhat I really want to know is why big G told Ricky and Herm to run and then dumped a load on them. If I was Ricky I think I’d quit praying, after the one this summer the part of Texas under severe drought went from 15% to over 85%. He is 0 for 2 in prayer, might be time rethink all that, maybe go with the Flying Spaghetti Monster and become a pastafarian.
I may have said this previously but I honestly feel bad for vast majority of Republican voters. Can you imagine having to take Gingrich seriously – he’s now running as the “Washington Outsider” – this is the Ministry of Peace Doublespeak. I saw one cartoon called “Get Your Vote On” by David Rees where the topic was how Obama’s got this race locked up (due to the Republican candidate fiasco) and one of the characters say “It’s not fair! The Democrats aer the one who are supposed to have candidates everyone hates. That was the glory of our two party system!”
ReplyDeleteToo true and too funny. The candidates are either so bad that Herman Cain was actually a viable candidate until he imploded (Think Ross Perot with an enhanced libido) or marginalized like Jon Huntsman and to a degree Romney. I’m not sure that Ronald Reagan with his second wife Nancy and their liberal Hollywood background would survive the current Republican thirst for family values and Jesus.
Medina64,
ReplyDeleteHow can you NOT say that Obama is trying to divide the country? You need to look no further than this very blog, which is not much more than a reflection of the constant rhetoric output by the Democratic party.
If that's not enough, just look at other entries on this CoD blog (i.e., different topics previously entered) and then tell me that you honestly don't see the anger and attacks launched against the Republican party, the wealthy and Religion.
But look, there's nothing wrong with this. Freedom of speech is a great thing. Obama can say what he wants, others can repeat it - but call a duck a duck.
JF, I think I understand what you are saying and will try to answer-this will be in two replies because of the character limit. Let me know if I didn’t get your points. Your first claim is that Obama is dividing the country – and that seems to an adamant claim given your capitalization of NOT. So let me respond:
ReplyDelete1. The Republican primary seems to be pretty divisive to me. There have been extensive personal attacks on all sides, attacks on the wealthy, and claims that various candidates are lying their asses off. In addition, there has been a lot of innuendo about Mitt being a Mormon. Am I mistaken here or have these primaries been a microcosm of the larger countrywide debate? Has Obama been responsible for that?
2. What about the attacks on Kerry’s military service? Republicans say that they respect the military and those who serve – but the attacks on Kerry were untrue and a complete violation of that Republican position.
3. What about Clinton’s impeachment – led by Newt? The genesis of that was Troopergate, the pre-election attack by the Republicans that featured Clinton’s affairs. There is an interesting book called “Blinded by the Right” written by David Brock who was the Republican operative behind Troopergate. The entire strategy during that period and during Clinton’s presidency was to trash his private life and stall his presidency.
I could go on for another 20 pages with stuff like this. So it strikes me as either naïve or disingenuous to blame Obama for the current political climate.
Now it seems that your next point is that COD has been this collection of angry posts and comments that attack Republicans, the wealthy, and religion. It doesn’t seem too angry to me, but then I can only speak about my feelings when I comment – I can’t read COD’s mind. What I suspect, and what I see in the zillion Republicans that I deal with on a regular basis, is projection. You are pissed and angry and you think everyone else is. But, let’s for the moment consider that COD is angry. He is supported in that anger by a number of former Republicans, for example:
1. Kevin Phillips, who was one of Nixon’s key political strategists, devised the Southern strategy that moved the south from the Dem party to the Rep party and who coined the term Sun Belt. He has written several books, most recently “American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century “ and “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis in American Capitalism”. Phillips is not an idiot and was for many years a respected Republican talking head, COD sounds like he is channeling these two books.
2. John Dean, former Nixon lawyer, in “Worse That Watergate” is which he evicirates the Bush presidency and the decisions that led to the mess we are in now. This is not some faggy Dem loser saying this shit.
3. The aforementioned David Brock in “The Republican Noise Machine” in which he fully and completely discusses Republican manipulation of the media and uses, gasp, numbers and statistics to prove his point (e.g. Reps get a lot more face time on Sunday talk shows than Dems, proven by Lexis/Nexis searches).
So, is it COD and posters such as myself being pissed and irrational or is it people like us discussing the reality of the current Republican party?
OK, now a brief statement of some of personal beliefs:
ReplyDelete1. The tone of the country has been this way many times in the past. Jefferson vs Adams, Jackson, the Civil war, Taft-Roosevelt, etc. I think it is just the way democracy works, you happen to be a Rep and I’m what I think is a realist. At this point, Dem positions with a dose of Ron Paul’s foreign policy is how I see things. Forty years ago I was a Buckley acolyte and believed his bullshit was the answer to most things.
2. The wealthy. It is not class warfare to observe that, in many countries and at many different times, extreme concentration of wealth led to the retrogression of that country. Let’s fix it so we don’t go down that path. Again, read Phillips, you get numbers and very close historical analogies to the failures of Spain, Holland, and England when they became similar to how we are now. I wish I was rich, my older son is working on a business deal that may make him rich and I hope it happens. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a fucking problem that shouldn’t be fixed.
3. Religion. You can worship whatever magic fairy in the sky you want to. To paraphrase Jefferson, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. But, stay out of the State Board of Education and how science is taught, respect a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her own body, and quit pretending that your fairy gives you infallible advice that entitles you to shit on others – especially if their skin is brown and they speak Arabic.
4. Lastly, the one area where I believe we are different from anything that has come before is climate change. Part of why I was a Rep many years ago was because they seemed to understand and accept the role science needs to play in a modern society. They have abandoned that and now deny science in many forms from climate change to the need to regulate dangerous industries to the fact that gay people are that way genetically and not by choice. Climate change is a train heading right for human society going faster by the year. We can argue about the way to deal with it, fine, I get that. But to deny it is happening is BS and should shame all Republicans.
I'm not pissed or angry or projecting. Let's look at just a few comments from you and CoD in past posts:
ReplyDelete- (on Global Warming) "..to deny it is happening is BS and should shame all Republicans" (I'll discuss this in context later)
- (on Religion) "..you can worship whatever magic fairy in the sky you want to..", "..entitles you to shit on others"
- (attack on me) "..strikes me as either naive or disingenuous.." (should I take this as a positive comment do you think?)
- "..I can't stand Newtie, Santorum deserves his Google search.."
- (on Trump) "I thought he was a soulless, aggrandizing pompous ass", "Self-aggrandizing blowhard.."
- "I also hope Newtie gets caught with his pants down in a Motel 6 poking Jerry Sandusky"
- "You have nut jobs like S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley.."
- "Goldman S*chs", "Why I hate Michael J. Fox",
And so on. But this tone is throughout many of the posts you and CoD make.
Do you really see these comments as being non-angry or non-devisive? How about your attack on me - "..being naive or disingenuous.."? Would you appreciate that commented turned on you? Probably not. But look, I don't care if you/CoD want to put some passion/anger in your posts, just realize that's what you're doing.
Addressing two minor points - first, you can't blame the current political climate on Clinton or previous years. I know the point you were trying to make was that "it's always been this way", but that just isn't true. Certain Presidents at times have also been divisive, but this is not a constant state of US political climate. BTW: Clinton was impeached because he obstructed justice by lying to a grand jury, not because he cheated. Given that, you can't blame the Republicans for proceeding with an impeachment process after the President committed a federal offense. In our legal system I think it's important to demonstrate when necessary that no one is above the law. In any case...
I blame Obama because 1. People are very quick to change their attitudes, we just need our leaders to lead by example which in my opinion starts with the President and 2. He is the US leader currently. He should be leading by example, and managing the political climate amongst the other leaders is part of his job. It would be like a manager in corporation 'xyz' blaming the team individuals on team in-fighting. It's exactly the manager's job to get these conditions under control.
Of course, your other comment "..deny it is happening is BS and should shame all Republicans" is also an attack on me. Again, should I take this as a positive comment? or if it were turned on you do you think you would view it as an angry tone?
I've done some research on Global Warming, read reports and reviewed the mathematical models from an Engineering perspective, and in my mind this issue is not such the "slam dunk" that it seems to be in your mind. Then again, I'm not a Global Warming expert but the point is - neither are you ... are you? Yet you're angrily attacking anyone that doesn't agree with your position with the same confidence. Even though the percent of people in the US that think there is "solid evidence" of global warming is down since 2008 from 72% to 58%. Over the same time, the percent of people that "..think climate change is an urgent problem and should be addressed now in spite of costs" is also down, from 43% to 29% since 2008. Other polls also done worldwide show similar trends, so....?
Again, I don't care how you (and CoD) choose to discuss these or other topics. I only care how our leaders behave because I see an unnecessary divide, and the rhetoric in Washington has exactly the same affect as it does in this blog: It discourages open communication between sides with opposing views.
JF,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your measured response, on many blogs this would have been turned into a food fight by now. Let me try to make my point differently. My understanding is that you want me to acknowledge that Obama is dividing the country. You also want me to acknowledge that my comments contain anger and are attacks on the Reps, the wealthy, and Religion. .
Let me address the Obama/division issue first. There is an article in this month’s Atlantic by James Fallows entitled “Obama Explained”. I found the article interesting but was struck by the following excerpt (OK, this kills the character limit, multiple comments needed)
==
... The most enlightening document I found for assessing Obama’s recent moves turns out to be 66 years old.
This is a memorandum that James H. Rowe Jr., a Harvard-trained lawyer who had been Oliver Wendell Holmes’s last law clerk on the Supreme Court and after World War II was a young official at the Bureau of the Budget, wrote to President Harry Truman soon after the midterm elections of 1946. In that election, the Republicans gained 55 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate, to take control of both houses for the first time since before the New Deal. Truman was if anything less prepared, for more overwhelming responsibilities, than Obama was. Three months after he unexpectedly became president upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death, he had to decide on the use of atomic weapons whose very existence FDR had never let him know about. After that came management of post-war Europe and Asia. But the fundamentals of Truman’s political situation, as described in Rowe’s memo, are amazingly similar to those Obama now faces.
Rowe tells Truman that, with the Republican victory, he should be prepared for obstruction and nonstop partisan stalemate, not because of strategic mistakes on his side but because this is the basic nature of the American system. Anyone who thinks that American politics is more embattled “than ever,” as I am often tempted to, should read this memo (and Samuel Popkin’s exegesis of it, in The Candidate).
Rowe points out that when an opposing party holds Congress, it will always view weakening the president as its paramount goal. It will launch as many congressional investigations as possible, in hopes of finding scandal in an administration or at least distracting its appointees. It will block nominations and try to frustrate a president’s attempts to keep the executive branch operational. Its leaders will define “compromise” as the president’s accepting all of their demands and abandoning his own. If the leaders of Congress do finally strike a deal with the administration, a president should be wary. The “simple fact” about most deals with a congressional opposition, he writes, is that “they just won’t work under the American two-party system”:
For “cooperation” is a one-way street. The President can discipline the Executive Branch sufficiently by exercising his right to hire and fire; he can force it to cooperate. The Republican leaders may agree to have co-equal responsibility for executing the agreements reached on policy but they do not have co-equal power “to deliver” … [Congress] has no parliamentary discipline … for a very simple reason—Congressmen are not representatives of all the people; they represent only their own districts or sections and the particular pressure groups within those sections which are vital to them. No Congressional leader can commit his party because no commitments are binding upon the Members except those they may personally make to their own sections.
Negative discipline, of the kind that Mitch McConnell has exercised to keep Senate Republicans voting as a bloc against Obama’s proposals, is easier to maintain than positive discipline, of the kind Newt Gingrich wielded temporarily over his Republican majority. That is the exception. A president “should first of all accept the inevitability that formal cooperation is unworkable,” Rowe concludes. “Despite his sincere desire to cooperate, he should accept the verdict of the politicians, of history, and of the disinterested students of government.”
ReplyDeleteAnd so Rowe offers his recommendation. With legislative ambitions blocked, with many appointments left to languish, with rear-guard battles under way to uphold vetoes and fend off investigation, a president should resort to the only tool that is uniquely his: the ability to speak to all of the public. He should prepare the ground by sounding reasonable and conciliatory, in light of an unquenchable if unrealistic belief that parties should be able to get along. (“Public demand for bipartisan cooperation will probably continue. The realpolitik of the situation requires that there be some gestures toward cooperation.”) Then, with his bona fides established, the president can move into the next election, making a clear case for his side.
==
I've looked high and low for the original but can't find it – but did find many other references to it. I did find a memo on strategy for the 1948 election that Rowe wrote for which Clark Clifford took credit – which is quite interesting also. Anyway, this supports my feelings/bias that the same shit happens over and over - hell this thing is 66 years old and could have been written yesterday. I actually believe this is how "democracy" works. Look at some of the incidents that occurred pre-Civil War in Congress, e.g. Preston Brooks/Charles Sumner.
With regards to the other points:
1. I’m not angry, I’m a smart ass by nature and that is how I typically express myself. I do get passionate, but that is not anger.
2. In my previous post I said that I’m not angry at or jealous of the rich. I think the current wealth imbalance has been shown historically (and currently in the Arab spring) to cause problems for societies where it occurs. I think we should work to fix that.
3. I’m the world’s biggest atheist. I make Myers, Dawkins, and Hitchens look like the Pope. Pretend you are discussing issues with someone who constantly quotes Zeus as an authority for how we should handle our problems. That is how I feel when religion is brought into any discussion, I’m not angry but unfortunately I see no need to address it reverently – it’s all Zeus to me.
To quickly address your two minor points:
ReplyDelete1. Can’t blame Clinton – I’m not. Per above I was trying to show how this type of division has happened in the past. BTW, if you will read Brock’s book he describes in great detail (since he led Troopergate upon which the impeachment was based) what the goal was and how it was financed by Richard Mellon Scaife. The “he lied under oath” is a technicality to hide what really happened – an investigation into Whitewater that turned into questions under oath about getting pussy. My point was, they used that to attack Clinton just like the Reps in this primary have used Newt’s pussy chasing against him. That is democracy – not Obama destroying the country.
2. Obama should be managing the political climate – I think the quote above speaks to that. I also think Fallow’s article does too in which he said Obama was unprepared for office (like all other newly elected presidents) and has made mistakes but seems to be learning.
OK, this is enough boring shit from an old dude (three fucking comments to hold it all, Alzheimers is setting in). COD needs to do a post on AGW so we can hash that out. Let me just say that I spent several years working onboard the JOIDES Resolution http://www-odp.tamu.edu/resolutn.html (we developed and installed a huge data collection system and database) and got to meet and work with several prominent climate scientists (like this guy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Shackleton )who were collecting core data. They convinced me it was real and I’ve spent the last 10 years studying it, why it has stalled, and what the consequences of our inaction will be. I’ll spare you my BS until COD puts up a post. Again, I appreciate your civility and I hope I’ve done the same (allowing for my smart ass temperament).