“You’re Walking Blind Without A Cane, Pal.”
If you’re at all informed, you have to be one world-class sucker to think that the Mitt Romney who presented himself at this weeks debate will bear any resemblance to how Mitt Romney would govern as a Republican president. Well, Ross Douthat is that sucker. The idea that congressional Republicans would pass a tax bill that prioritzed over reform over cutting upper-class tax rates, in particular, is remarkable.
Nope. I will not let you goad me into reading Douthat.
It’s a mango-free link…
Yeah, that’s what they all say.
I would do anything for LGM, but I won’t Douthat.
+1
Mitt Romney will do about as much middle-of-the-road governing while in office as George W. Bush does brush-clearing now that he’s no longer in office.
“None at all.”
Does hiring a minimum wage gardener to clear your brush count?
You pay minimum wage to your gardener? YOU COMMIE!!!
Mittster had illegal lawn care workers at his former house in MA. When he was informed of this, his response was that it would be unseemly for people to know he’d been hiring illegal immigrants, since he was running for office. And that’s why a new crew had to be brought in.
Belmont, MA. And he painted it orange.
Douthat doesn’t believe that himself, but he’s willing to go along with the gag, now that the right has soberly concluded that if there’s no lying, there’s not going to be a Republican in the White House for a long time. Seriously, if the tea party version of Romney were ahead by 10 points in the polls, would Douthat or Brooks be cheering for a (different) fake Romney? Of all conservative pundits, onlySteve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune takes a dim view of the newest fake, because he’s fake.
And it’s not like nobody knows he’s a fake. The only problem for Republicans is that 2012 is too close to 2010, and people might actually remember what Republicans did when they promised to create jobs and proceeded to spend 2011 trying to outlaw abortion, defund Planned Parenthood and bust unions.
I’ve never read Chapman, but I can tell you that Larison at American Conservative has raked Mittster over the coals pretty regularly. He also crapped all over Douthat’s elephant-shaped unicorns.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/
Yeah, Larison’s been fun to read, lately. “There Are Ways to Be Incompetent on Foreign Policy That Don’t Involve Starting Wars” was particularly good.
I’ve been trying to figure out Douthat from the time I first started seeing the “You should read this guy” type comments, and always seemed unable to find the impressive blog posts that other people were reading. Then he got the NY Times job and I figured, “Okay, now he’ll show off some of whatever those people were talking about….” Eventually?
Sometimes he seems genuine. Sometimes he seems like he’s positioning himself to cash in.
That’s the problem… for some people they won’t believe it unless we all live it. It will take electing Mitt for them to believe those silly paranoid Democrats. But President Christie will be much better.
John Dickerson at Slate claims it is “impossible” to know which Mitt would govern as President. I guess on some level this is Slate being Slate, but I really wish that site wouldn’t so insistently take their readers for fools.
Mitt with this Republican Congress would make Dubya look like Jimmy Carter.
thats the whole predicate of that sites’ existence
Why the feigned confusion? It’s not like there’s more than one Mitt Romney. It’s not like he mixes his messages when he’s speaking to his major campaign donors. Up to a few days ago, he was pretty clear on what he stood for – tax cuts for the rich, and screw the working class and poor. I doubt that there’s a Republican donor who sees his “pivot” as anything but as cynical marketing. They don’t think he’s going to be ‘revenue neutral’ with their tax cut, and they certainly don’t think he’s going to attack “too big to fail” financial institutions.
If you look at the very few things Romney was consistent about coming into the debate, that’s what he stands for. The rest is about getting elected. He’ll govern in the same way – push his very small agenda to the benefit of his peers, push whatever other agenda he believes will help him get reelected, and flip public positions every time a poll tells him it’s what the public wants to hear.
Exactly. Mittens’ deep, personal soul might not be as right-wing as his campaign (or it might be) but the idea that Mitt Romney that is going to engage in a bunch of principled fights with his own party to moderate the Republican legislative agenda is too stupid to entertain for longer than a minute.
Yeah. Basically the only way it would be safe to think passed legislation would resemble Nice-Moderate-Romney’s claimed policies is if, as in Massachusetts, the Democrats held 80% of the seats in Congress.
That would be enough that Republicans would have a hard time obstructing, and even Democrats of the Ben Nelson variety would have a hard time causing problems trying to pull things to the right.
….if Massachusetts Democrats held 80% of the seats in Congress.
Are Massachusetts Democrats all that different from national Democrats? My understanding is that there’s a pretty substantial number of quite conservative Democrats in Massachusetts, at least at the state level.
Truer ten years ago than now.
The ethnic-machine-urban Democratic walrus is an endangered species — a non-trivial number of Scott Brown voters are remnants of this tribe.
Compared to Arkansas Democrats, ohhhh yeah.
The fishing towns near Innsmouth are still pretty conservative, and so is the hill country around Arkham.
Dunwich is tending to vote Republican these days, and Kingsport is full of Portuguese these days, except for the old man still living on Water Street.
Regarding the passing of the ‘Beck moment’ that the link mentions, check out Bill Whittle…have become acquainted w/him thru some retard rw facebook pages I visit. He’s Beck all buttoned-up and icy-calm. But the content is not a bit different. I think he makes them feel like they’ve reached a more sophisticated level than with Beck’s carpet-chewing, but like I said the content is every bit as puerile, just packaged differently.
In MA, Romney never voiced any strenuous objections to legislation the Democratic legislature sent up to him, or really never tried to articulate or advance his agenda. I’m told his budgets did decimate school funding. I can’t see him exerting much sway over Republicans in Congress.
Chunky Reese Witherspoon dodged a bullet. A dim, porcine bullet.
Wow. Even though I consider myself aware of all internet traditions, I had somehow missed the whole “chunky Reese Witherspoon scares Douchehat’s willy” meme, til your post sent me a-googlin’.
That dude needs to wrestle some demons.
Privately. Very, very privately.
Precisely what have we done to deserve this?
Here’s Tbogg’s take on M. Douthat from earlier this year.
Why are you implying that Douthat is at all informed?
Douthat is a symptom of the Yglesias disease: he went to a stellar undergraduate institution, therefore he must have something important to say. It doesn’t matter how often he gargles up stupidities, his CV says we should be listening.
At least Yglesias didn’t make his mark with a book about what a terrible student he was at that institution.
He’s a symptom of the national media’s desire to have bland, inoffensive spokesmen for both liberal and conservative points of view (Next, on NPR we hear from analysts across the political spectrum. All the way from E.J. Dionne to David Brooks!) that they’ll round someone like Douthat up to a thinker because he’s willing to put a polite gloss on the crazy while making allegedly centrist noises. While, and this is most important part, fluffing the media elite and not pointing out the general political agenda (left on social issues, right on economics) that they push. They really don’t like pundits to talk about that.
The New York Times don’t want to publish the real conservative stuff because it’s so crazy and pernicious and they fancy themselves as being above the Cal Thomases or George Wills of the world. But they do actually believe in the idea of balance so they promote nonentities willing to play act.
Oh, and he’s pompous twit who’s willing to pontificate about things outside his ken.