WARNING: The YouTube Video below is not safe either for work or Mitt Romney. There’s a part of me that hopes that the Rap-Artist known as Chapter engaged in evil satire when she wrote and performed the song portrayed in the video above. I also hope that GOP Presidential Candidate, Mitt Romney was engaging in satire when he made the following comment. “I’m in this race because I care about Americans,” Romney said. “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” With only one foot in his mouth, Romney still remained hungry after his tiring victory in the Florida Primary. He rides further into his dung heap below. “I’m not concerned about the very rich,” he continued. “They’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation.” Reaction from the Left was predictable. Chuck Todd tweeted his predictably nausea-inducing bilge. Many a POTUS prayer breakfast speech includes talk of caring about the poor but today when one hears it, seems to take on a diff meaning? Austin Goolsbee scored higher on the sense-of-humor metric. Headline: Romney not worried about the very poor, has nice roof cages available for any that “like fresh air. (HT: The Hill) But just how do we approach this gob-smacking gaffe from The Right? Clearly it disqualifies Mitt Romney from professional consideration as a future conservative leader. Clearly it inspires all of those in America who want to trash the Conservative Movement, and run the welfare spending odometer well into the tens of trillions. It was political equivalent of drinking strychnine, and we need to get this political cadaver named Romney embalmed and buried as rapidly as possible. But how do we critique this without opening the floodgates to dependency nation? We start by learning from one of our most intellectually-gifted political opponents; Former Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan served as one of Lyndon Johnson’s Assistant Secretaries of Labor. In this position he wrote an famous/infamous federal report entitled The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. Apparently “Safety Net” Mittens hasn’t given this work any perusal. The Moynihan Report has had long-lasting and important implications. Writing to President Lyndon Johnson, then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Patrick Moynihan argued that, without access to jobs and the means to contribute meaningful support to a family, black men would become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers. This would cause rates of divorce, abandonment and out-of-wedlock births to skyrocket in the black community (a trend that had already begun by the mid-1960s)—leading to vast increases in the numbers of female-headed households and the high rates of poverty, low educational outcomes, and inflated rates of abuse that are associated with them. (HT:Wikipedia) The obvious tragedy and failing of Moynihan’s brilliance is that it focused solely on blacks. This led critics to just write off the truth as racism. Anyone diligent enough to make it all the way to the end of Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant will quickly realize that it’s not just African-American families that are disintegrating under the perverse incentives of the modern safety net. The lower ten percent of African-Americans are far from the only group of people in America just living for free; off the EBT. Even Ann Coulter now seems to be drinking the RomneyCare Bug Juice. (HT: Jeff Emanuel). When Mitt Romney says not to worry about the poor, they have a safety net, he’s telling us to get over our foolish and anachronistic Conservatism. We don’t empower people to improve themselves and thereby redeem their particular corner of our tragically fallen world. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day…” is out the window in Mitt Romney’s version of the GOP. It’s more like give every ten of them a ball and hope you don’t have too many armed robberies next Saturday Night. The Poor know when they are condescended to. They know when they are being treated like cattle. They know when they are being bribed with transfer payments not to put the torch to Los Angeles. This may not always be articulated, but the poor are not human if that simmering anger and resentment isn’t there. My family comes from working-class roots. My Father worked on the farm to help his Dad make both ends meet. I know enough of what Lower Income America goes through to know good and well that our current safety net is one of the worst things that ever happened to America’s working poor. If we really intend to nominate “Safety Net” Mittens and bribe the poor with EBT Cards not to riot for the next four years, then the poor are morally right to hate The Republican Party.
See original here:
Mitt Had Better Worry About The Poor
WARNING: The YouTube Video below is not safe either for work or Mitt Romney. There’s a part of me that hopes that the Rap-Artist known as Chapter engaged in evil satire when she wrote and performed the song portrayed in the video above. I also hope that GOP Presidential Candidate, Mitt Romney was engaging in satire when he made the following comment. “I’m in this race because I care about Americans,” Romney said. “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” With only one foot in his mouth, Romney still remained hungry after his tiring victory in the Florida Primary. He rides further into his dung heap below. “I’m not concerned about the very rich,” he continued. “They’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation.” Reaction from the Left was predictable. Chuck Todd tweeted his predictably nausea-inducing bilge. Many a POTUS prayer breakfast speech includes talk of caring about the poor but today when one hears it, seems to take on a diff meaning? Austin Goolsbee scored higher on the sense-of-humor metric. Headline: Romney not worried about the very poor, has nice roof cages available for any that “like fresh air. (HT: The Hill) But just how do we approach this gob-smacking gaffe from The Right? Clearly it disqualifies Mitt Romney from professional consideration as a future conservative leader. Clearly it inspires all of those in America who want to trash the Conservative Movement, and run the welfare spending odometer well into the tens of trillions. It was political equivalent of drinking strychnine, and we need to get this political cadaver named Romney embalmed and buried as rapidly as possible. But how do we critique this without opening the floodgates to dependency nation? We start by learning from one of our most intellectually-gifted political opponents; Former Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan served as one of Lyndon Johnson’s Assistant Secretaries of Labor. In this position he wrote an famous/infamous federal report entitled The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. Apparently “Safety Net” Mittens hasn’t given this work any perusal. The Moynihan Report has had long-lasting and important implications. Writing to President Lyndon Johnson, then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Patrick Moynihan argued that, without access to jobs and the means to contribute meaningful support to a family, black men would become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers. This would cause rates of divorce, abandonment and out-of-wedlock births to skyrocket in the black community (a trend that had already begun by the mid-1960s)—leading to vast increases in the numbers of female-headed households and the high rates of poverty, low educational outcomes, and inflated rates of abuse that are associated with them. (HT:Wikipedia) The obvious tragedy and failing of Moynihan’s brilliance is that it focused solely on blacks. This led critics to just write off the truth as racism. Anyone diligent enough to make it all the way to the end of Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant will quickly realize that it’s not just African-American families that are disintegrating under the perverse incentives of the modern safety net. The lower ten percent of African-Americans are far from the only group of people in America just living for free; off the EBT. Even Ann Coulter now seems to be drinking the RomneyCare Bug Juice. (HT: Jeff Emanuel). When Mitt Romney says not to worry about the poor, they have a safety net, he’s telling us to get over our foolish and anachronistic Conservatism. We don’t empower people to improve themselves and thereby redeem their particular corner of our tragically fallen world. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day…” is out the window in Mitt Romney’s version of the GOP. It’s more like give every ten of them a ball and hope you don’t have too many armed robberies next Saturday Night. The Poor know when they are condescended to. They know when they are being treated like cattle. They know when they are being bribed with transfer payments not to put the torch to Los Angeles. This may not always be articulated, but the poor are not human if that simmering anger and resentment isn’t there. My family comes from working-class roots. My Father worked on the farm to help his Dad make both ends meet. I know enough of what Lower Income America goes through to know good and well that our current safety net is one of the worst things that ever happened to America’s working poor. If we really intend to nominate “Safety Net” Mittens and bribe the poor with EBT Cards not to riot for the next four years, then the poor are morally right to hate The Republican Party.
Continued here:
Mitt Had Better Worry About The Poor
[Posted by Karl] ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED !? In the current wave of generally conservative punditry on Newt Gingrich’s candidacy, a common subtext (and occasional text ) is criticism not of Newt, but of his supporters: [C]onservatives are simply out for a good time. They want to be entertained by a Gingrich-Obama slugfest in the general election debates, and they are willing to sacrifice everything — their credibility, their values and the White House — to sit in the Coliseum and watch a Christian get devoured by lions. Blaming the electorate is rarely effective and this line of attack is no exception. In the first instance, to the extent Gingrich’s campaign is feeding on populist discontent, his supporters are unlikely to be swayed by a parade of pundits perched at big media outlets telling them they are shallow rubes. To the contrary, the implicit condescension probably fuels the underlying populist discontent. If these pundits are hoping to persuade, they are likely failing. If they are writing simply to vent their own frustration, how different are they from their stereotype of Newt’s supporters? Moreover, on the campaign trail, Gingrich apparently comes off as far more substantive than Mitt Romney. That would not surprise me. Gingrich is nothing if not an an uncontrolled, gushing firehose of policy. Some of his ideas may not be conservative. Some of his conservative ideas may be irrelevant to the major issues facing the next president. But the notion that support for Gingrich is simply the desire to be entertained ignores the facts on the ground, which again makes for bad punditry. The problem for these pundits is not that Gingrich is Maximus, manipulating the mob to get ahead. Their problem is that Romney is Commodus, the political heir of dubious legitimacy who tries but fails to co-opt the mob. Ironically, their Circus Maximus of criticism is being staged at the very moment when Gingrich looks to be losing momentum . It would be even more ironic if Gingrich could again turn the criticism of his supporters to his advantage. — Update : Via Twitter, I have learned that S.E. Cupp thinks it’s bad journalism on my part to not identify her as the author of the blockquote, although I did link to her article immediately beforehand. I generally like her work, and thus was loath to single her out as having written something so condescending and counter-productive. I forgot there’s no such thing as bad publicity. My apologies. –Karl
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Gladiator Republicans
[Posted by Karl] When it comes to WaPo blogger Jennifer Rubin, I’m not likely to top Dan McLaughlin : “For months, she mocked stop-Romney movements. Now this , writ & stained with tears”: Dear Govs. Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, John Kasich, Bobby Jindal; Sens. Jon Kyl, Marco Rubio and Jim DeMint; and Reps. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and Mike Pence (R-Ind.) : *** *** The voters in their infinite wisdom have just given a huge boost to perhaps the only GOP candidate who could shift the spotlight from President Obama to himself, alienate virtually all independent voters, lose more than 40 states and put the House majority in jeopardy. *** So how about it? One of you can run yourself. Or you can instead collectively get behind a not-Gingrich candidate. But really, if you are to have a Republican Party to lead one day in the future, you can’t very well do nothing. My own view is that any one of you would be preferable as a candidate to Newt Gingrich, as would either Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney… Rubin’s agenda here is typically transparent. Although styled as a “Anyone but Newt” plea, Ron Paul is implictly eliminated and NJ Gov. Chris Christie gets a pass because he has endorsed Mitt Romney. Indeed, she’s not stupid enough to believe any of her targets could plausibly enter the race at this point; her piece is merely a plea for Romney endorsements. Although generally critical of Rubin’s modus operandi (note she was equally critical of Romney to boost McCain in 2008), I previously kinda-sorta defended her, arguing conservatives disporortionately attacked her work because her prominent position at the WaPo presents a skewed view of the Right to a mass audience. However, the problems with Rubin run deeper and beyond the merits of her argument. The fact that Rubin’s diagnosis of the Romney campaign is that it lacks enough establishment endorsement says much about Rubin as a thinker, not much of it good. Those who do not read my work regularly should know upfront that I find the amount of venom spewed by some in the ongoing RINO/TruCon argument on the Right to be tedious. It’s an argument that leads both sides to make arguments that simply have no empirical support. Rubin is pretty clearly on the RINO side of that dispute and for the purposes of this post, I do not hold it against her. However, Rubin’s analysis of the campaign – i.e., Romney needs more endorsements, Romney needs to attack Newt (as though he hasn’t), Newt’s populism can be easily dismissed — is dull-witted, even when she has a point . The TruCon perspective is so (to use the Newtian term) fundamentally illegitimate to Rubin that it must be denied or crushed — as though there are not political consequences which would follow. The populism surging on both the Right and Left in the wake of the Wall Street meltdown and subsequent Obama malaise may not be an unalloyed good, but the lesson of South Carolina is it is one of the biggest obstacles to a Romney nomination and his supporters ignore or mock it at their peril. Romney’s skid — both in SC and national polls — coincided with renewed attacks on Romney’s image as a fatcat financier. However much Rubin — or I — may find those attacks wrong or unfair in many cases, it was obvious to everyone that such attacks would come. Well, obvious to everyone except Camp Romney (including Rubin, apparently). Rubin’s blog over the past few days has been an echo of the the flailing Romney campaign, stuck in denial that Romney should have been better prepared and running a more competent campaign (especially as competence is what Romney is selling). As someone who has catalogued Newt’s flaws as a candidate , noted that he is an idiosyncratic revolutionary in ways which may be unconservative and found his attacks on the courts to be over-the-top , I should be the sort of person to whom Rubin’s views might appeal. But if her dismissal of large factions of the movement were not offensive enough, Rubin seems unable to express that dismissal in any manner other than disingenuous condescension. Her agenda is transparent, but she seems to think she’s cleverly cloaking it in pieces like today’s “open letter.” I think even those who disagree with Rubin more than I do would at least respect her more if she honestly wrote that she thinks Mitt is the only electable candidate in the race and that the entire weight of the establishment needs to publicly destroy Newt Gingrich this very minute. Her disingenous attempts at subtlety make her sound like The Girl Who Cried Newt — even if she’s right, she’s bound to be ignored. –Karl
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The Girl Who Cried Newt
Two Tebow pieces of interest to Tebow fans: First up, Joseph Bottum , who made a big hit with his Christmas-themed Amazon Single (a short ebook) Dakota Christmas , has published another one, this time on Tebow: The Gospel According to Tim: Believe in him, I mean: believe that he’s for real. The young man is drunk on charity, in the same way he’s drunk on the endorphins that race through his body during his strenuous daily workouts. In the same way he’s drunk on the excitement of winning and losing football games before roaring crowds. In the same way he’s drunk on what the medieval mystics used to call “the gift of tears,” weeping easily and often. In the same way he’s drunk on his constant conversation with the Lord, referring all his victories and all his losses up to heaven. Tim Tebow isn’t a Christian theologian. He’s a Christian mystic–intoxicated, as all mystics are, with God. He’s King David, dancing in the joy of his youth before the Ark of the Covenant. There is a theology, certainly, implicit in the prayers Tebow says, the hymns he sings, and the witnessing he performs. But whether he’s able to make it explicit or not, he rarely does. He expects, instead, his sheer fervorous presence and ecstatic deeds–the drunken joy he takes in it all–to do the work for him. He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? That’s good writing! Thought ya’ll might like. And this piece on Tebow and the Atheist’s Dilemma Also, with all that’s going on, you may not realize that Lent is about a month away. I want to once again recommend to you Paula Huston’s really excellent Simplifying the Soul . It is written in such an accessible and inviting way, that I think many of you will find it very valuable. Here is an excerpt . I like the book so much, next week I am going to give away three copies. As soon as I figure out how to do that! Speaking of Lent, you know Magnificat Magazine is ready with another outstanding Lenten companion for the low, low price of $3.95. You can’t go wrong with anything put out by Magnificat, and that’s sort of a thoughtful little gift for someone around you, perhaps. And since Lent is a time for “recommended reading” I am beginning to amass a group of books to recommend to you. Given the combox of this post , I’m starting with At the Heart of the Gospel , by Christopher West. We’ll read; we’ll talk. Originally posted here: The Gospel of Tebow? More Reads
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The Gospel of Tebow? More Reads
