Lynching-by-proxy, Republican navel-gazing, the view from the bottom rung, Romney’s cashflow problem, the Senate question, no one left to race bait, The Most Interesting Endorsement In The World, Romney’s missing two minutes, Mother Jones gets O’Keefe’d, and Peggy Noonan murder porn.
Welcome to the Daily Sausage.
First up, we have a report from Katherine Haenschen of The Burnt Orange Report, a sports blog covering Austin and the University of Texas, about a homeowner who has hung a empty chair in his front yard as a proxy for the President.
Now, before we concern troll too much, here are the homeowners own words:
“I don’t really give a damn whether it disturbs you or not. You can take [your concerns] and go straight to hell and take Obama with you. I don’t give a shit. If you don’t like it, don’t come down my street.”
And some words from Ms. Haenschen:
There are folks who will claim that this isn’t “racist.” Republicans, especially the Tea Party types, like to claim that liberals think every attack on the President is racist. Folks like to claim that hanging a noose up as decoration is “honoring the past of the South,” blithely ignoring the context in which those same nooses were used during the pre-Civil War and Reconstruction eras — by white men to hang African-Americans. Some folks will undoubtedly point out the burning of Bush effigies throughout his administration, especially during anti-war protests.
This is different. This is the specific and deliberate use of a racially charged act of violence — lynching — perpetrated by white men against African-American men and women. When you add a Republican symbol for the first African-American President into the mix, you get a pretty awful picture — the one you see at right, and one that can be seen on a front lawn here in leafy, quiet Northwest Austin.
I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
Doghouse Riley is up next with “Even the Conservative David Brooks”, and some Grade-A GOP navel-gazing:
Y’know, this is the sort of political cowardice which put the Republican party increasingly in the hands of the people Mitt Romney has been incrementally pandering to for the last seven years. It’s the sort of political cowardice which, in the hands of John Dickerson’s cohort, or Democratic centrists, has enabled it, because calling this shit out requires calling it shit. What Romney said was precisely what Paul Ryan has been saying for the entire Obama administration. The math hasn’t changed. The ugly reality behind that attitude hasn’t changed. People on Social Security are, by and large, elderly, or disabled. And they’re there because at one point–long ago, now–we were a moral enough people to judge that such people should not be eating out of garbage cans in a land of plenty. That access to the resources of this country carried with it a responsibility to help husband those resources, including–especially–human resources. How did this come to be debatable, Mr. Brooks? How did the year 2000 lead directly to the 14th century, if not via Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman?
And leave us mention, as well, that at least half of those 47% are women, and your party’s been busy all season telling them to shut up and birth some more babies. Y’know, in my experience, smart decisions are a lot less likely than stupid decisions to fall victim to bad timing.
Very nice.
Huffington Post’s Tom Zeller Jr. has a phenomenal article on poor rural minorities, and the view from the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
Jeremy W. Peters and Nicholas Confessore from the NYTimes’ Politics blog have a great article on the Romney campaign’s finances. Long story short, a good chunk of the cash Romney’s been raising has been going downticket to the RNC and other candidates and groups. Of course, because of the nature of the electoral map, a GOP Presidential candidate has to significantly outraise a Democratic opponent just to be competitive, since the electoral path to victory for them is much, much narrower.
TPM Editor John Marshall has posed an interesting question: is Mitt Romney tanking the GOP’s chances of winning the Senate?
Elizabeth Warren is beating Scott Brown. Tammy Baldwin is beating Tommy Thompson. Claire McCaskill is beating Todd Akin. Tim Kaine is beating George Allen.
That’s not to say it’s a lock. There are still opportunities for both sides to win.
However, the conclusion that President Obama will be saddled with a full GOP-controlled Congress is not such a sound one anymore.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is on a roll with his new article, “No One Left To Race Bait”.
See, the fundamental premise that the Southern Strategy was based on was that there was a large enough group of voters in this country that didn’t care if they were living under a bridge cooking rats on a curtain rod, so long as the blacks, browns, and gays didn’t have a bridge, rats, or curtain rod.
As Coates notes:
as a racist appeal becomes more abstract, it doesn’t simply become more devious, it becomes less racist, and thus less potent.
And that’s what the GOP is running in to.
In May of 1970, when he was a young former journalist working for the White House, Pat Buchanan offered President Richard Nixon some tips that he’d never stop using. “I strongly endorse symbolic gestures toward groups,” wrote Buchanan, “especially the blacks where symbols count for so much.” In order to divide the country effectively, Nixon had to pretend that he wasn’t dividing it at all. “The President is President of all the people and while they will never vote for us, we must never let them come to believe we don’t give a damn about them — or that they are outside our province of concern.”
Mitt Romney, believe it or not, lacks Nixon’s subtlety. While Nixon could cleave the electorate with scalpel, Romney only has a chainsaw.
The Most Interesting Man in the World held a fundraiser for President Obama. The Least Interesting People in the World are boycotting Dos Equis. Moving on.
Wonkette asks “What happened to the missing two minutes in the Romney tape?”
Here are my theories:
- Romney was handed a better business card than his and he started shaking and sweating.
- Romney promised a homeless man some money, but shot him instead.
- Romney tried to feed a kitten to an ATM.
- Romney went on a soliloquy about Huey Lewis and the News whilst donning a raincoat.
- Romney tried to get reservations at Dorsia and failed.
Related: Romney’s campaign is fighting the charges by calling the tape “debunked and selectively edited”. Has anyone shown them anything ever done by James O’Keefe? He’s like the gold standard in “debunked and selectively edited”. You guys just got punked by Jimmy Carter’s grandson. There’s a difference.
And finally: Peggy Noonan murder porn? Peggy Noonan murder porn.
Mitt was down for the count. Bill and Brooksy had already taken their kicks to his ribs, while Peggy stood silent, unfiltered Camel in her claw. She watched, her snake lips thinning even further as they stretched across her skull for her “smile.” Just as Bill was about to deliver his boot to the back of Mitt’s head, Mitt’s jaw carefully opened and propped on the curb,Peggy finally spoke. “No,” she spat in her unmistakable goon-speak. “Let me.”
