The Romney blame game

Mitt Romney seems to be resolute in his delusion about the election and why he really lost.

This week during a conference call with some big-money supporters, he threw plenty of blame around, most of it involving charges that Barack Obama offered various “gifts” for certain segments of voters, like women, blacks and Hispanics.

According to this New York Times article:

“In each case, they were very generous in what they gave to those groups,” Mr. Romney said, contrasting Mr. Obama’s strategy to his own of “talking about big issues for the whole country: military strategy, foreign policy, a strong economy, creating jobs and so forth.”

This statement is contemptible for numerous reasons.

First, rather than Obama’s policies being viewed through a lens of necessity and obligation to move civil rights ever forward in order to actually help people — rather than, you know, merely giving lip service to the idea that you care about average Americans — Romney casts Obama as some kind of political profiteer, and indeed the whole election as just one big sales pitch. This approach not only dehumanizes politics; it dehumanizes and trivializes the candidates as well as the voters.

Romney’s statement above also happens to be a wild misrepresentation of what really happened. Obama didn’t just focus on civil rights and immigration during the debates and speeches leading up to the election, and Romney didn’t have anything new to offer on jobs, foreign policy or military strategy. Regarding employment, he said that he would create 12 million jobs in four years, true. But Moody’s Analytics has estimated that 12 million jobs will be created through 2016 regardless of who is president. Job creation estimates are based on policies that have already been implemented. This was Romney’s only substantive claim about job growth.

Further, during the final debate, other than the obligatory Republican call to expand the military, we couldn’t really tell how Romney was any different than Obama on foreign policy and the military. According to this Reuters article:

Monday night’s foreign policy debate between the Republican presidential nominee and the Democratic president was striking for the frequency with which Romney aligned himself with Obama’s strategies rather than distancing himself from them.

So, what was this “strategy” Romney was talking about that was focused on the big issues? On most of the big issues other than health care, he more closely aligned or even agreed with Obama’s policies.

I don’t make a practice of watching a lot of MSNBC because I think that would make me no better than FOX News viewers who tune in every day to have their own views confirmed, but Al Sharpton (He should not be a TV host for many reasons) did have an interesting segment tonight in which he featured a previously unreleased audio recording of Lee Atwater outlining what he thought should be the more modern GOP strategy for taking advantage of white bigotry in the early 1980s. Here is one of the more offensive parts:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Romney, Bill O’Reilly, Paul Ryan and others within the GOP have essentially used this strategy to cater to the uneducated, white vote in the South and other rural parts of the nation. While they can’t say anything approaching the offensiveness of “nigger” anymore, they can play on the same white fears that they have for the better part of a century. It’s a hideous but effective strategy.

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Top 10 things that should disappear immediately (but probably won’t)

1. Balloon boy — The next ridiculous “weird” news story that, in truth, deserved two paragraphs of coverage and nothing more, yet the media ballooned this thing into the ether (sorry it was irrestible), and we groan collectively.

2. Glenn Beck — We only need to watch Beck’s on-air sniveling, scare-mongering for about two minutes to realize that there’s little in the way of Painean common sense in that noggin.

3. Michael Jackson — Why dredge up yet another posthumous track from another dead pop star? The tradition is an old one, from John Lennon to Kurt Cobain to Tupac. This reminds me of Dave Chappelle’s hilarious skit about Tupac’s song from 1994.

4. Limbaugh, Al Sharpton — Limbaugh (thankfully) won’t be an NFL owner (at least not right now). Rush writes a column for the The Wall Street Journal. Sharpton threatens to file a lawsuit. Again, groans. Both are polarizing figures and are as predictable in such polarization as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

5. Dave Letterman’s personal life — Although it was commendable in some rights that he told his story of bribery and sexual actions on the air, we really don’t care. Just give us jokes, Dave. And if you couldn’t tell, the audience wasn’t even clear whether you were jesting or were actually serious.

6. Anna Nicole Smith — Drinking from a baby bottle? That-a-way to make your life come full circle! Get yourself so screwed up that you are reduced to sipping a sedative straight infant-style.

7. Rod Blagojevich — “Celebrity Apprentice?” ‘Nuff said.

8. Celebrity Apprentice, Dancing with the Stars, etc — Again, groans.

9. Larry King — Next four guests on the show: Balloon boy (See No. 1), Suzanne Somers, George Lopez and Maria Shriver. Hard-hitting, important interviews there. I’m not sure at what point King became irrelevant, but the point has long-since passed.

10. Blogs as news aggregates — I don’t make this final point to toot my own horn. In fact, I wish I could write more, but the simple nature of my approach to blogging limits how much time I can devote to it (as I also write news stories, sports stories and usually a column for a newspaper each week). Rarely, very rarely, I might post a single photo and a single sentence and make that “my” statement for the day, but this guy, Andrew Sullivan, is an aggregater among aggregaters. In one day (Oct. 17), I counted more than 20 posts. On another day, I counted about 40 … in a single day! True, he’s a good writer and reporter. His “Dear President Bush” for The Atlantic is exceptional, and I highly suggest folks take a look at it, but we don’t see much of that writing in his blog. Of the 20-something posts I counted today, most of the quotes from other sources were longer than the actual original content of the post itself. One “post” was just a picture of a painting with a caption from another source, saying how the painting, once valued at millions of dollars, was bought for $19,000.

I’m highly hostile of blogs of this kind because they simply don’t say anything. Sure, Sullivan has surely said plenty in his other endeavors, but why have a blog if you aren’t going to say anything? Anyone with a Web browser can find a bunch of quotes and links and put them together. I refuse to roam the Webosphere and collect a collage of news items every single day. Anyone can regurgitate information previously posted elsewhere. Indeed, it’s hard for me to imagine Sullivan having time for other endeavors, when on this day, he “blogged” from 8 a.m. to nearly 9 p.m., cobbling together these 20-something posts of quotes and pictures.

This is the predominant reason I stayed away from blogging as long as I did. I saw it as a short cut, something akin to a slightly wordier Twitter, in which folks who aren’t really writers (Sullivan really is a writer; I just use his ill-conceived blog as an example), turn to this medium to espouse their opinions in a pithy sentence or paragraph, but who don’t really have the wherewithal to flesh out full arguments. Thus, I decided if I were to pursue a blog of sorts, it would actually contain well-thought-out opinions. My posts, then, are more like essays; that’s why they come less frequently than others but with more content. They are an attempt to inform and make people think about concepts and ideas other than, perhaps, what they normally would.

The above points, however, have the opposite effect, and this is the reason why I made this list.

Note: All but the last point on this list were referenced from CNN, the most trusted name in news.

Debate with Rev. Sharpton

The following is an entertaining and civil debate between the Rev. Al Sharpton and author Christopher Hitchens on the topic of whether morality can exist without God. 

One predominant topic of the debate was the question of morality. Sharpton obviously asked the question, “On what do we basis morality” without a supervisory being, falling back on often-quoted verbatim (but not by Sharpton) argument that if there is no god, everything is permissable. This is a line from “The Brother’s Karamazov,” which, even when I first read it many years ago, and knowing little about philosophy, theism, deism or any of it, struck me as a “profound” line, as Hitchens duly noted it was. In his rebuttal, Hitchens quoted Steven Weinberng: “Left to themselves, evil people will do evil things and good people will try to do good things, but if you want a good person to do a wicked thing, that takes religion.”

The question-answer session near the end, skipping past the crude jokes at the beginning, introduced topics like, Do we as humans have an innate need for ritual (church services, communion, mass, etc), Who created God, if he exists, and the last question, why  didn’t Sharpton, who holds the Christian title of reverend, not once defend the Bible. Sharpton answered that he was not there to defend the Bible, but to argue for God. And his argument seemed to boil down to personal experience (I feel him in my heart; therefore he’s real, for example), which can’t be quantified.

Despite Sharpton’s round-aboutness and, sometimes nonsensical answers, and Hitchens in-kind crassness, this entertained me enough to watch all the way through. And I must say, even if Sharpton didn’t quite match Hitchens’ arguments, Sharpton did match Hitchens’ overt confidence (even in the midst of the reverend’s sometimes puzzling responses) point for point.