Why Santorum is Good?: "Rick McDumbF*** just gave everyone the enigma machine!"

The Daily Show breaks down Conservative rhetoric.

Hard to believe this is the last in the 20 episode running series called the Republican Primary Debates. And still, they get weirder yet, especially with Sen. Rick Santorum (PA) as one of the more frightening front runners. It's also pretty amusing to see Conservative media react to Santorum going full blown FOX pundit (even when he's not in a primary debate). No! Santorum, you're only supposed to imply these things. I personally think it's a great service to voters to have the social conservative GOP agenda spelled out loud and clear. Whether we all like it or not, that's where this election season is going.

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Indecision 2012 - Rick Santorum's Conservative Rhetoric
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America For Sale

The last time I wrote about Mitt Romney, I reported that his religious beliefs were curious but mostly harmless, and ultimately of little concern.

This remains true. However, I also noted that “the former governor of Massachusetts and current Republican candidate for President in 2012 is a charlatan and a swindler.” Now that he has achieved so much success campaigning for president, I think it’s important to talk about how he’s earned those distinctions.

Romney has amassed an enormous fortune in the private sector; by his own estimation at least $200 million, with others speculating that it could be as high as $260 million. For some reason, a number of uninformed voters equate his vast wealth with his grasp of how the entire U.S. economy operates. As best I can tell, the argument appears to be “How could he have made so much money without understanding how the business sector works?”

As evidenced by his career with Bain Capital, the private equity company which Romney co-founded and obtained most of his wealth while working for, Romney does know a lot about the economy – but only enough to exploit it for its own game.

Here we go again...back to the Twilight Zone

By Nathan Rothwell

FUN FACT: If you google “santorum”, hilarity ensues.

But if you google “Rick Santorum,” you might find an interesting news item – a moment that could very well have secured failure for any Republican hope of retaking the White House in November.

At a recent town hall meeting, the former Pennsylvania senator and presidential hopeful Santorum fielded a question from a Florida voter who might best be described as “unhinged.”

"I never refer to Obama as President Obama because legally he is not," the woman began. “He constantly says that our constitution is passé, and he ignores it as you know and does what he darn well pleases. He is an avowed Muslim and my question is, why isn't something being done to get him out of government? He has no legal right to be calling himself president."

Religious Beliefs Should Remain Private

Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and current Republican candidate for President in 2012 is a charlatan and a swindler. 

He was a supporter of women’s rights when he was running for governor of one of America’s more liberal states, then ever-so-conveniently changed his mind years later in order to boost his social conservative credentials. He’s worth more than $260 million dollars, yet tells unemployed voters he sympathizes with their plight because he’s also “unemployed” (while running for President is hardly a money-earning endeavor, he’s still doing so by choice). Romney also once infamously asserted that his sons’ service to his failed presidential campaign in 2008 was a more important task than the service of those in the U.S. military.

However, rather than focus on these and other examples of his chicanery, prominent media figures have instead elected to unfairly attack his religious beliefs. So as much as it pains me to do it, I believe Romney deserves some defense here.

Romney is a Mormon, one of the newer and fastest-growing sects of Christianity. Even though Mormonism dates back nearly 200 years and has always professed itself as part of the umbrella of Christianity, some (such as Baptist minister and Rick Perry supporter Robert Jeffress) have obnoxiously proclaimed that Romney should not be considered a candidate for President because he’s not a “real” Christian.

The "G" in GOP stands for greed

FUN FACT: Today is your birthday!

Well, probably not. But just for fun, pretend you and your twin sister just turned a year older. It’s kind of a pain to share the special day with somebody else, but at least Aunt Tracy’s looking out for you.

Every year, Aunt Tracy sends you and your sister $100 to share. But here’s the best part: Aunt Tracy always loved you best, and every year she insists that you get 84 of those dollars. You’ve tried to justify this split in your head for years, but in truth there’s no logical reason. Plain and simple, she likes you better, and your sister only gets $16.

This strange form of gift-giving has been going on as long as you can remember, but things started to change right around 2008. Aunt Tracy is getting a little older, and her medical bills are starting to increase. As a result, she’s only sent you and your sister $90 for the past few years – yet still insisted you keep the same 84% share of the money.

But you were always Aunt Tracy’s favorite, and that’s why she’s come to you with an interesting ultimatum. You can either keep taking 84% of the gift, or agree to share some with your sister.

Your Aunt Tracy is fine with you keeping the same chunk of the birthday gift that you always have, but she’s issued a warning: as long as you refuse to share any more with your sister, the yearly gift will be smaller and smaller until Aunt Tracy finally runs out of money.

But if you agree to let your sister have $40, she’ll up the yearly gift to $120. You won’t get quite as much as you used to, but this will ensure that Aunt Tracy (with a little help from your parents, who were growing tired of the inexplicable inequity) can continue sending you money long into the future. The choice is easy, right?

One would think the second choice is common sense. But to most Republicans, this smacks of “class warfare.”

Aunt Tracy might not be real, but the analogy certainly is. The top 20% of wage-earners in the United States control 84% of the nation’s collective wealth, with the remaining 16% controlled by the rest of us. The bottom 50% of Americans, in fact, control a scant 0.3% of the pie. This kind of income inequality puts the U.S. in company with other such nations as Mexico, Rwanda, Mozambique and Serbia.

It’s no secret that our government is going broke. We’ve arrived at this point through a series of wars that were never paid for, and cheered on by warhawk blowhards who insisted that Iraqis and Afghanis would greet us as liberators, and gladly repay our efforts from their oil fields. For the first time in American history we fought a war funded by the nation’s Mastercard, and the bills are piling up.

Many of the warhawk blowhards who pushed for war all over the media in 2002-2003 belong to the top 20% - the ones who control most of our country’s money. They never wanted to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they still don’t. Instead, they’ve introduced a series of outright lies designed to placate an ignorant public while ensuring their chokehold on 84% of America’s money remains firm.

LIE #1: “Entitlement” spending is out of control

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has recently been touting his memoirs on the punditry circuit, famously argued that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” His tenure with the Bush administration proved that Republicans took this practically as marching orders, as our country blindly plunged into two wars in the Middle East while simultaneously enacting massive tax cuts – something never before attempted in our nation’s history. The GOP stared reality in the face and refused to back down, never acknowledging the hidden tolls that unending wars and tax cuts would take on our economy.

When the Democrats won back the presidency with Obama’s election, suddenly deficit spending DID matter. But rather than acknowledge the mistakes made during the Bush era, Republicans have instead elected to attack social programs aimed at protecting our nation’s poor, such as Medicaid and Social Security.

Presidential hopeful Rick Perry lambasted Social Security as “a Ponzi scheme,” and the rest of the candidate field consistently refers to federal health care programs as “entitlements,” as if those who utilize them feel “entitled” to their benefits without contributing their own funds to the program. Rather than own their mistakes, Republicans would rather blame old, sick, and destitute Americans for dragging our country down, and enact cuts to social programs as punishment.

LIE #2: Tax increases are a “punishment” on success

U.S. Representative John Fleming (R-Louisiana) recently made headlines by complaining in an MSNBC interview about his yearly income. Evidently, after the money earned by his chain of Subway restaurants (about $6.3 million last year) was taxed and used to pay business expenses, he “only” had $600,000 left over to personally invest in his business as well as “feed his family” – this on top of the annual $174,000 he earns from being a Congressman. Any increase in his taxes, Fleming argued, would be too much of a burden given his current income.

When pressed by MSNBC host Chris Fleming that his position was not sympathetic to the average American making less than six figures a year, he was quick to blurt the second big Republican lie: “being successful in business is a virtue, not a vice.”

Notice the framing here. While Fleming’s statement isn’t false on its own, he’s made clear how most wealthy conservatives feel about taxing corporate profits – like it’s a vice that the government is attempting to curb, much like the taxing of liquor or cigarettes.

Wealthy businessmen of Fleming’s ilk truly believe that they are the golden cogs that keep our economy moving, and closing tax loopholes will leave them unable to create the new jobs we desperately need. You know, the same ones they exploit in order to establish factories and call centers overseas, and hire international workers to fill formerly American jobs at a fraction of the cost.

LIE #3: The way to increased revenue is to “broaden” the tax base

This cynical talking point has been a favorite among Republican presidential frontrunners. Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachmann, and numerous others have cried foul at the fact that so many Americans living off minimum wage salaries are exempt from paying income taxes. By “broadening” the tax base, they argue, and ensuring that everyone pays something (“even if it’s just a dollar!” Bachmann herself as argued), our revenue shortfalls will be magically solved.

No matter how you try to spin it, 20% of our country controls 84% of the wealth in our country. When nothing is done to relinquish that stranglehold, phrases like “broaden the tax base” are birthed – phrases that are simply code for “how can we squeeze every last penny out of the other 16%?”

Return to our Aunt Tracy analogy for one more moment. This is where the real class warfare lies. The real cynicism in all of this lies in the fact that the one with $84 dollars in his pocket refuses to admit that a dollar does not share the same value to him as it does to the one with $16. The “twin sister” who comes up short every year represents the vast majority of America, the ones who can’t afford to attend $30,000-per-plate fundraisers to make sure their interests are represented in Congress. They work hard every day to earn a salary that on average is 1/85^th the size of what’s paid to CEOs in this country.

But you can’t argue with success. It seems to be working for Mexico and Rwanda.

CNN/Tea Party Debate: Sexing up the GOP race and making $$$$

Debate: a contention by words or arguments (Webster's Dictionary)



Video by crooksandliars.com. 

Following last week's "nonsensical" Republican debate, the jointly organized CNN/TEA PARTY debate advanced the GOP presidential field of crazy and fueled questions that I could only file away into the "what the shit is this?" compartment in my brain.

A great deal has been speculated about the unusual marriage between CNN and the Tea Party. CNN itself has put efforts into explaining why it partnered with the party. Even Tea Party activists have noted that the debate, sponsored by the conservative Heritage Fund, is a situation of "strange bedfellows." Admittedly, it is a legitimate claim that the "Tea Party" has been a major influence in American politics over the last year and that voters should be informed about how this group will affect the election process. The point of the debate, Wolf Blitzer explained, "Its important that the American public knows where the candidates agree on the substantive issues and where they disagree. We want everyone watching to emerge from this debate more informed about these eight people who each want to become the President of the United States." 

However, the CNN/Tea Party debate has come off as a pure PR spectacle that only loosely resembled a debate, in which the aim is to offer voters a chance to become informed about important political issues and the candidates' actual positions. Take for example, CNN's preamble to the debate: a slick introduction that seems suited for revving up a crowd before a sporting event, cues which the audience diffused into wild applause and booing.

Considering that CNN's follow-up analysis and its own video of what some producer somewhere approved of as being the "greatest moments" of the ordeal, this debate might as well have been billed like a wrestling match: "Romney vs. Perry: the talking-points BLOW OUT of the year!" Because, basically, before anyone has the chance to begin to pick apart the candidate's talking points from one another, the scene has already been set. CNN even gave all the candidates catchy names, like characters in a Tarantino film. By the time Wolf Blitzer opens his mouth, you already know who the "best" candidates are ... and we are told to anticipate a rhetorical sparring match between them. This becomes what the debate is about, and the picky "my state is better than yours," "you're contradicting what you wrote in your book," side-arguments become the grounds for deciding which of the obviously favored candidates won. 
   
While presidential debates have been well regulated since 1987 by the Commission on Presidential Debates, primary debates are another matter entirely. The primary debates have clearly devolved into a complete circus ring that simultaneously exposes the moneyed interests major media outlets have in peddling the increasingly sexed-up debates and the complete joke our national political discourse has become.  

Unfortunately, there is also very little incentive for the major networks to keep this upcoming primary season from being anything other than a charade. The Project in Excellence for Journalism notes that the 2008 presidential campaign translated into record breaking advertising revenues for all three leading cable news outlets: FNC, MSNBC, and CNN.

GOP's "nonsensical" Reagan Library debate

Wow, the level of crazy within the leading field of Republican presidential candidates has remained incredibly consistent throughout the string of irreverent debates. However, cutting through the side issues, the primary GOP PR strategy for the election centers on economic issues: government debt and job creation.

While the potential presidential candidates largely agreed on many issues, the hot topic of job creation resulted in some major talking points clashing into an unintelligible word salad. As The Nation's Ben Adler writes, the arguments the candidates are pushing in order to at least rhetorically position themselves as job creators are just "nonsensical":

The only major back and forth occurred around a curiously meaningless debate: which governor on stage presided over the most job growth and who would create the most jobs as president. For a party that claims government does nothing as well as the private sector and that efforts to improve society are a fools errand, it’s an odd obsession. If you believe, as Mitt Romney has repeatedly asserted, that it is business rather than government that creates jobs then how can you argue that you will do so as president?

---

The governors all came prepared with job-related factoids to hurl at each other. “Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt,” said Perry, while Huntsman told Perry that forty-seventh best “just won’t cut it.” Romney countered that Texas created more jobs under Perry’s predecessor, George W. Bush, than under Perry. He also defended his record and minimized Perry’s by noting that Massachusetts and Texas have different political and economic conditions.

Although, Texas Governor Rick Perry and Mitt Romney had a "my state had more jobs than your state" pissing contest during the debate, both candidates easily play into the myth the Republican party relies on for votes: that government ... no. THE government, our government, is bad. Not only bad, but that it, and its most vital democratic institutions are not to be trusted. Controlling the political discourse on the economic issues plays well into the GOP 2012 electoral strategy. By constantly demonizing government and the positive roles it plays in our lives, a theme of deep seated mistrust of government and it's institutions emerges. Among some voters, an outright hatred of the government emerges. The apparent surge of extreme politicians in both the states and Congress, along with their determination to obstruct democratic processes at every turn, has opened the door to policies which undermine our democratic institutions to the benefit of powerful corporations. Former Republican Congressional Staffer, Mike Lofgren, describes how the Republican party essentially gets away with winning their self-perpetuating war on language:

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

 It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

Governor Rick Perry (TX) and Representative Ron Paul (TX) during commercial break.

Needless to say, the focus on stoking populist rage while bolstering polices that help businesses more than American citizens is no way to create jobs. It is almost laughable that such circular logic packaged in punchy soundbites can convince anyone that these candidates and their ideas should be taken seriously. However, I personally, cannot laugh at these people until everyone else is laughing too. Because we all should be. The real world implications of the GOP PR strategy translating into actual policies are already coming to fruition in dozens of states via union busting, de-funding or underfunding government services, and tightening voter registration requirements.