The Mittstorm Hereth, the NFL Referee Lockout, clearing the underbrush, and stop. Obama Time.
Welcome to the Daily Sausage.
As some of you may have heard. Willard Mitt Romney, Republican Candidate for President, managed to both step on and trip over his own dick yesterday after a tape was released of him at a private fundraiser. In this video, Romney discusses the 47% of Americans that do not pay Federal income tax, describing them as moochers, versus producers like himself.
First up, Charles P. Pierce chimes in.
We are coming rapidly toward a devastating confluence of two colliding panics. The Romney campaign is panicking about itself, and the Republicans are panicking about the Romney campaign. He cannot come back from this, honestly. This is who he is. This is what he believes the world to be. Half the electorate already thinks he’s a fake, which means he’s not a very good one. There’s really only one campaign left to him now.
Unfortunately for American politics, that means only one thing. It’s going to get extraordinarily dirty extraordinarily fast. There is going to be pale birtherism and barely covert racism. The body of Ambassador Christopher Stevens is going to be exhumed and used as a bludgeon. There is going to be poor-baiting, and gay-baiting, and ladyparts-baiting, and probably baiting of things I haven’t thought of yet.
Oh yes. This is right about the time the McCain Campaign let Sarah Palin go off the rails and started going after Jeremiah Wright et al. We’re less than two months from Election Day. If this had come out months ago, there might still be time to save the ship. But this is the Titanic hitting the iceberg. The bow decks are flooding and all the rats are fucking their way to the stern before they take the icy plunge back into the frigid waters of unemployment off the upturned ass of the S.S. Romney/Ryan.
Don’t believe me? Here’s Bloomberg’s Josh Barro:
You can mark my prediction now: A secret recording from a closed-door Mitt Romney fundraiser, released today by David Corn at Mother Jones, has killed Mitt Romney’s campaign for president.
How about NYMag’s Jonathan Chait:
The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable. It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.
He also compares it to President Obama’s infamous “clinging to guns and religion” remark from the 2008 campaign:
Obama was aspiring to become president of all of America, even that part most hostile to him, in the belief that what they shared mattered more than what divided them. Romney genuinely seems to conceive of the lowest-earning half of the population as implacably hostile parasites.
Ouch.
You know it’s bad when the New York Times’ David Brooks piles on with “Thurston Howell Romney”:
Romney’s comments also reveal that he has lost any sense of the social compact. In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62 percent of Republicans believed that the government has a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Republicans believe that.
The Republican Party, and apparently Mitt Romney, too, has shifted over toward a much more hyperindividualistic and atomistic social view — from the Reaganesque language of common citizenship to the libertarian language of makers and takers. There’s no way the country will trust the Republican Party to reform the welfare state if that party doesn’t have a basic commitment to provide a safety net for those who suffer for no fault of their own.
Certainly not as damning as some of the other writers featured today, but you take what you can get from David Brooks.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza calls this “Mitt Romney’s darkest hour”:
The video will fuel the growing sentiment within the Republican chattering class that Romney is in the process of losing a winnable race. That means the second-guessing that goes on privately in every campaign will go more public. And the more public it becomes, the longer it takes Romney and his team to move beyond unhelpful process stories focused on whether his own party thinks he’s blowing it.
Yup. It’s never good when the rats start fucking in public
Finally, two articles from The Atlantic. First up, David A. Graham asks “Where are the 47% of Americans who pay no income taxes?”
If you guessed “The South and Southwest”, you get a gold star. When Mitt Romney is talking about the 47%, he’s talking about HIS OWN BASE. South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Idaho… They’re all in the top ten. The top 20 adds in North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, Arizona, Utah, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Montana. 16 out of the top 20 states with the largest number of filers with no Federal tax liability are Red states. Of course, most of these states are the same ones that receive way more Federal taxes than they give. If only there were a candidate adamantly opposed to moochers.
And finally, Ta-Nehisis Coates hits on the one thing no one else has: “We are all Welfare Queens now”.
You can paint a similar history of the welfare state, which was first secured by assuring racist white Democrats that the pariah of black America would be cut out of it. When such machinations became untenable, the strategy became to claim the welfare state mainly benefited blacks. And as that has become untenable, the strategy has become to target the welfare state itself, with no obvious mention of color. At each interval the ostensible pariah grows, until one in two Americans are members of the pariah class.
In all this you can see the insidious and lovely foresight of integration which, at its root, posits an end to whiteness as any kind of organizing political force. I would not say we are there. But when the party of white populism finds itself writing off half the country, we are really close.
This isn’t just young bucks buying T-Bone steaks and Welfare Queens driving Cadillacs anymore. This is the collateral damage of fifty years of Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy and thirty years of supply-side economics.
Ed from Gin and Tacos has a great article on the fallout from the NFL’s replacement referee’s.
You might think that a tiny light bulb is appearing over the heads of a lot of white American males – the only group that cast a majority of its votes for John McCain in 2008, and also the primary audience demographic of the NFL – as they realize: Hmm, maybe all human capital is not interchangeable, and maybe there are some noticeable downsides to a market in which whoever will work for the least gets the job. On the one hand, the scab referees are much cheaper than the unionized “real” refs. On the other hand, they are fucking terrible.
Of course, the league doesn’t give a damn about the product. They just want to break the union.
TPM’s Brian Beutler has a good article on how Beltway Deficit Hawks fail to graple with GOP anti-tax absolutism.<
Simpson came the closest. “You’ve gotta clear out the real underbrush of Grover Norquist,” he said referring to the conservative anti-tax activist who has obtained commitments from the vast majority of GOP congressmen to never effectively raise taxes. But Simpson quickly equated GOP anti-tax absolutism to the less intense efforts of senior groups to prevent changes to entitlement benefits. “You’ve gotta take this guy [Norquist] on, because if you can’t get Grover Norquist and shoot him over the moon, and you can’t do something with the AARP and these congresspeople are in thrall to Grover Norquist and the AARP, we ain’t gotta prayer.”
Once again, who the fuck elected Grover Norquist to anything?
And finally, if you missed this in yesterday’s Open Thread, here it is again: “U Didn’t Build That” by MC ‘Bama.
