Doin' the balky cha cha

From Zazzle.com.

Sportswriter Buzz Bissinger in the Daily Beast, via Zandar:

When I told my wife Lisa that I was writing a column supporting Mitt Romney for president, her reaction was both impressive and revealing:

“Why don’t you write about the infield fly rule?”

Listen to Lisa, buddy, she only wants to spare you pain.

I have never seen a performance worse than Obama’s, distracted, his head dipped into the podium as if avoiding the smell of something rotten...

Absolutely. That's why I'm always trying to get Wayne Newton to run against Harry Reid.

acting above the very idea that a debate does provide a pivotal referendum on his first term as it has for all incumbent presidents...

Except Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, Hoover, and so on, including Lincoln (who only debated in his Senate race). And depending on what a pivotal referendum might be, in the sense that to most of us a referendum is a kind of vote, and the vote in November is what we call pivotal, deciding as it does whether the incumbent gets a second term or not, whereas the debate is more like the rhythmic gymnastics event at the Olympics, with the difference that there aren't any actual judges with the ability to declare a winner at all, just volunteers like Buzzy here.

By instinct I still cling to my Democrat roots. But I admit that as I get older, on the cusp of 58, I am moving more to the center or even tweaking right, or at least not tied to any ideology. Those making more than $250,000 should pay more taxes, and that does include me. But...

Yes?

I also am tired of Obama’s constant demonization, of those he spits out as “millionaires and billionaires,” as pariahs....

Mom always said, and I'm sure Lisa would agree, that if your millionaires and billionaires taste disagreeable, or are difficult to chew, you should quietly get them into your napkin and your napkin into your lap, and from there to the kitchen garbage as soon as you can find an excuse to head there. Spitting is never excusable.

Romney’s comments at a fundraiser were stupid, but 47 percent of Americans do not pay federal income taxes. Yes, a majority are poor and seniors. But millions do not pay such taxes with incomes of more than $50,000, and whether it’s as little as $10, every American should contribute both as a patriotic obligation and skin in the game. This is our country, not our country club.

Ah, yes, damned elitists at those country clubs, constantly giving out free memberships to people who abuse the wealthy.

This man is a very remarkably bad writer, at a level beyond your George Wills and David Brookses. I won't even get into Romney's "balky cha cha cha with the old white men of the conservative Republican wing", or the theory that Romney planned to lower the income tax rate to 20% as opposed to by 20%, or

I respect his principles, the way he does not veer from them, but politics is not principle whether we like it or not. It is friendliness and compromise

or

I grew up on the Upper West Side of New York, arguably the country’s nexus of liberalogy, where it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least as a child to discover that my parents, along with all the other attendees in some garret reminiscent of the French Resistance, had thrown eggs at Abbie Hoffman at a political get-together because he wasn’t liberal enough

or

I believe that Romney’s move to the center is not yet another flip-flop sleight of hand, perhaps naively. I believe he will send to the political Guantanamo those dirty old white men of the party ready to bomb Iran...*

or defend Obama from the charge that he frivolously neglected hanging out with all the Middle Eastern leaders to appear on The View**, or even explain carefully that Willard Mitt Romney is an Old White Man himself.

I'd just ask you to note, once again, that there's a connection between bad writing and bad thinking, and that's what makes it important.

From lpcoverlover.

*Given that Romney's dear old pal and Shadow Minister for Mideast Affairs, Binyamin Netanyahu, is as dirty, old, white, and ready to bomb Iran (or rather watch the Pentagon bomb it) as anybody, I believe I'll bet on Obama for this one, thanks. What planet does Bissinger's newspaper come from, actually?

**Come to think of it, I will, because I haven't seen anybody get to this: Obama refused to meet with Netanyahu and went on The View as a very precisely calibrated insult to the Israeli PM, but publicly meeting with the Arabs would have made the insult stronger than he intended, and so he had to blow them off as well. They understood perfectly; the press didn't understand at all, as it wasn't expected to; and the (un)diplomatic move was a spectacular success—Netanyahu obediently moved his famous red line out to next year sometime. In fact, if the press had understood it wouldn't have worked as well, because publicity would have made the PM feel obliged to show everybody how belligerent he is. As far as getting work done, BHO knows how to operate telephones to pretty good effect. Face to face meetings are not for work but for face time, which is why Netanyahu wanted his so badly.