Columnist.
There's a great old "Fawlty Towers" scene (if you're unfamiliar with the 1970s British sitcom, hie thyself to YouTube!) in which Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), an innkeeper, welcomes some German patrons. He gives explicit orders to everyone: "Don't mention the war!" He then proceeds to mention the uncomfortable subject of World War II over and over again. In one scene, after blurting out references to the war a dozen times while seating the Germans at the restaurant, he says to his wife, "Listen, don't mention the war! I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right." He then returns to the Germans' table to review their lunch order: "So! It's all forgotten now, and let's hear no more about it. So, that's two egg mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering, and four Colditz salads."
The bleating about broken government and partisanship continues. "Why can't those boobs in Washington agree on anything?" We're constantly told that the way to fix the country is to dethrone the left and right and empower the middle. Americans Elect, No Labels, the Gangs of Six and Fourteen, conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans: Handing things over to these middling mincers and half-a-loafers is supposed to be the answer to all of our problems. It's as if we should just put Nelson Rockefeller's mug on the dollar bill and be done with it.
Warning: What you are about to read is a deeply cynical view of the 2012 election. If you're looking for puppies and rainbows, check back with me another time. Many conservatives feel like this is the most important election in our lifetimes because we desperately need to reverse the damage done by the Obama administration and get the economy moving again. Indeed, each of the remaining GOP hopefuls makes some version of this argument. They will fix what Obama (or Washington) has broken. The president, meanwhile, like a little kid smashing a clock with a hammer, says he just needs a little more time to fix everything.
As gasoline prices climb, President Obama's poll numbers plummet. In February, a Washington Post/ABC poll had Obama up 6 points against Mitt Romney. Monday's poll has him down 2. According to the polls, gas prices are a huge part of the story, particularly given how the last 30 days or so have not exactly been great for the GOP. No wonder Obama is desperate to get out in front of the issue. The dilemma is that he's invested so much of his prestige in his energy policies that he can't admit those policies have been an abject failure. But he also can't have people thinking his policies are responsible for the energy price Americans care about most: gasoline.
There's a great scene in the movie "The Right Stuff" where the original Mercury astronauts are checking out the capsule for their first trips to space. They're horrified to discover that the German scientists in charge of the program see the astronauts as nothing more than living props. There is no window, the scientists explain. There's no emergency hatch or even controls for the astronauts to use. It's all automated. "We want a window," the astronauts demand. The white-frocked experts reluctantly agree to give the astronauts a window and piloting controls because they know the American people would hate to see the nation's greatest pilots treated like lab monkeys with no say in their fate.
In 1984, Mario Cuomo pioneered the argument that one may be "personally opposed" to abortion, while supporting abortion rights. Ever since, this convenient locution has become a staple for countless Democratic politicians, particularly Catholic ones. It is Vice President Joe Biden's view and was Senator John Kerry's stance when he ran for president in 2004. Cuomo's argument was a mess. For instance, in order to buttress his argument he touted the (alleged) refusal of American Catholic bishops to forcefully denounce slavery. The bishops "weren't hypocrites; they were realists," Cuomo explained. They offered a "measured attempt to balance moral truths against political realities."
Andrew Breitbart's heart was too big to fail, but it did anyway. If you don't know who Breitbart was, you haven't been paying attention. A conservative activist, entrepreneur, author, muckraker, media pioneer and performance artist of sorts, in his heart he was a radical. His friends saw him as a fearless truth-teller and provocateur. (The word "fearless" will have to be retired from overuse when all of his obituaries have been written.) His enemies, and they are legion even in death, saw him as the most vile creature who ever slithered upon the earth.
There's no disputing that Republicans are surly these days. With the exception of South Carolina, turnout among GOP voters has been tepid. Hordes of commentators, me included, have argued at length that this apathetic grumpiness reflects a deep dissatisfaction with the Republican field.
"If we could just take a little bit from each of them." I've lost track of how many people I have heard say some version of this in the last couple of months. The "each of them" refers to the final four combatants for the Republican nomination. You could take Newt Gingrich's verbal dexterity, encyclopedic grasp of politics and techno-optimism. Add in Rick Santorum's authenticity and religious conviction. Combine that with the essence of Ron Paul's principled passion for liberty and limited government. Stir vigorously and then pour into the handsome, squeaky-clean vessel of Mitt Romney (while keeping his business acumen and analytical skill). And voila, you'd have the perfect candidate.
"It's not about contraception," thundered GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum. "It's about economic liberty. It's about freedom of speech. It's about freedom of religion. It's about government control of your lives. And it's got to stop!" He was talking, of course, about the Obama administration's recent decisions first to force large religious employers to pay for birth control and "preventive services" (including sterilization and abortifacient drugs), and its subsequent decision to demand that the relevant insurance companies provide it for "free" instead.
OK, I give up. About a week ago, I wrote a column making a case for Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee. My argument was aimed at fellow conservatives who just can't get their minds -- or at least their hearts -- around a Romney candidacy. The details aren't important right now (and they're easy enough to look up with the interwebs these days). The reason I wrote the column in the first place was that I felt the cold steel barrel of reality's revolver pressing up against the back of my head, saying "write it."
If you're not with us, you're against us. President Bush popularized this expression after 9/11 to describe his foreign policy doctrine: Countries couldn't support or indulge terrorists and be our friends at the same time. But his detractors quickly turned it into a fairly paranoid vision of domestic political life, as if Bush had been talking about domestic opponents and dissenters. The irony is that few worldviews better describe the general liberal orientation to public policy and the culture war. The left often complains about the culture war as if it's a war they don't want to fight. They insist they just want to follow "sound science" or "what works" when it comes to public policy, but those crazy knuckle-dragging right-wingers constantly want to talk about gays and abortion and other hot-button issues.
The governments in Russia and China very much want to uphold the principle that every now and then the state must crush people who want freedom. That is why they worked together to veto a fairly toothless United Nations resolution condemning the regime in Syria and calling for President Bashar Assad, the lipless murderer who runs the place, to step down.
Years ago a friend told me a story from her days living in South America. The movie "Wayne's World" had come out, and she went to see it. She spoke English, but it was interesting to read the Spanish subtitles. For instance, early in the film, Wayne says: "Shyeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt!" The Spanish subtitles read: "Yes, when judgment day comes." Needless to say, something was lost in translation.
Jesse Jackson is right. In response to the face-off in Arizona between President Obama and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer last week, Jackson said, "Even George Wallace did not put his finger in Dr. King's face." And it's true; he didn't. Similarly, not even Josef Stalin wrote two autobiographies the way Obama has. And even Genghis Khan didn't have a Swiss bank account the way Mitt Romney did.
President Obama's State of the Union address was disgusting. The president began with a moving tribute to the armed forces and their accomplishments. But as he has done many times now, he celebrated martial virtues not to rally support for the military, but to cover himself in glory -- he killed Osama bin Laden! -- and to convince the American people that they should fall in line and march in lockstep. He said of the military: "At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don't obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach."
Newtzilla is back. Six weeks ago, during the last Newt Gingrich surge, I wrote here that "conventional weapons are useless against Newtzilla. ... Everything bad about Gingrich -- the flip-flops, the wives, the ego -- is known. Once voters have convinced themselves they can overlook that stuff, it's hard to change their minds simply by repeating it." For a while, it looked like I was wrong. The relentless artillery fire from Mitt Romney's "super PAC" seemed to have felled the gray-maned leviathan in the cornfields of Iowa. But as anyone who has studied the oeuvre of Toho Studios (makers of more than 25 Godzilla films) knows, this is what usually happens to the heroic creature in the second act.
"In the Treasury we do not speak of tons of silver. Our unit is the troy ounce." That was the response from some bureaucrat when Leslie Groves, the man who oversaw the Manhattan Project, sought thousands of tons of silver to be turned into electrical wires. Groves got his silver. Why? Because completing the Manhattan Project -- and winning the war -- was America's top priority. For three years, the Obama administration and its cheerleaders have tried to claim that they stand for the same can-do spirit. Administration officials have a rare form of Keynesian Tourette's syndrome whereby they blurt out phrases like "Infrastructure!" ... "Spending multiplier!" ... "Shovel ready!" ... "Nation-building at home!" ... "Investment!" almost as often as they draw breath. Just last week, Obama's own handpicked jobs council -- perhaps looking at the fully employed and booming oil state of North Dakota -- advised that the U.S. must embrace an "all-in approach" to the energy sector, including the pursuit of "policies that facilitate the safe, thoughtful and timely development of pipeline, transmission and distribution projects."
"Corporations are people, my friend," Mitt Romney declared in a testy back-and-forth with hecklers last summer in Iowa. It was among the first of what appears to be a growing list of gaffes Democrats will use to hang around Romney's neck in the less than certain but more than likely eventuality that he is the Republican nominee for president. Much like his more recent statement about how he likes to "fire people," the corporation remark has been taken grossly out of context. The "fire people" line simply referred to the fact that he likes to use his power as a consumer to deny his support to firms -- specifically insurance companies -- that don't provide good service. Who doesn't like doing that? Let me know who you are and I will gladly sell you a lifetime supply of unicorn repellent. No refunds, of course.
One thing is clear: At best, Mitt Romney is a work in progress. Romney is under attack for being a hugely successful private equity banker at Bain Capital. Bain identified distressed companies and found value in them for shareholders, investors and, ultimately, consumers. When things worked right, Romney and his team streamlined firms and injected fresh capital, and helped companies thrive by returning them to their "core competencies." He took his turnaround skills to the Winter Olympics (and, he argues, to the governor's mansion in Massachusetts). When the 2002 games were in utter disarray, he swooped in, cut out all the self-dealing nonsense by consultants and contractors, made the fat cats and moochers pay for their own meals, and got things back on track.
