The
other Jennifer Rubin, the one who hasn't spent her life making the world a slightly better place, has come up with a listicle of favorite Republican moments of the week, with an air of desperate, Rubinesque randomness:
Best visuals on announcement: Former Texas governor Rick Perry in an airplane hanger surrounded by veterans made for a compelling tableau. Since then, he’s had one of the strongest performances in the field.
OK Jennifer, so this is an airplane hanger (works better for shirts than for airplanes; Rick Perry is smaller than an airplane, but he still wouldn't fit):
This is an airplane hangar with Rick Perry in it, making for a compelling visual but unable to attract Sean Hannity's attention:
Best speech: Tie between Jeb Bush at Liberty University and Rick Perry on race and poverty. Both were thoughtful and humble, a rare combination in politics.
Because you see such a lot of humble, but most of your humble guys are just airheads. Nice that Perry got a new speechwriter to go with those glasses. Accessorizing is really important. Here's some of that
thoughtful humility from ¡JEB!:
I don’t know about you, but I’m betting that when it comes to doing the right and good thing, the Little Sisters of the Poor know better than the regulators at the Department of Health and Human Services [in insisting on their right to prevent their employees from having health insurance that covers family planning]. From the standpoint of religious freedom, you might even say it’s a choice between the Little Sisters and Big Brother – and I’m going with the Sisters. That case continues, and as usual the present administration is supporting the use of coercive federal power. What should be easy calls in favor of religious freedom, have instead become an aggressive stance against it. Somebody here is being small-minded and intolerant, and it sure isn’t the nuns, ministers, and lay men and women who ask only to live and practice their faith.
It sure is the nuns, ministers, and lay men and women who refuse to recognize that their employees might have needs with which nuns are not that well acquainted, or that trying to impose on those laypeople a choice between celibacy and pregnancy might not be "the right and good thing", let alone a blow for religious liberty. Seeing themselves as the aggrieved bottom of this pile of oppression, unable to recognize the existence of the oppressed beneath them, is as arrogant as it gets.
Make that bold, memorable, and stolen, and from an optician's shop too.
Best new idea: “Three-out, one-in” is Bush’s formula for reducing the size of the federal workforce. It is specific, concrete and feasible....
The program there is to reduce the size of the federal payroll, by
10% over a five-year period. The administration would never be allowed to hire anybody unless they succeeded in cutting three people first, with exceptions for security and safety personnel. It's not actually a "new idea" or Bush's plan at all but a piece of stupidity that was introduced in Congress last January, when its dangerous fecklessness was
already clear:
“Unfortunately, the federal workforce is facing death by a thousand cuts,” wrote AFGE President J. David Cox. “The number of workers employed by the federal government is currently at an all-time low — less than 2 percent of the total U.S. workforce. The last time the number was this low was in the Eisenhower administration.”
The magical character of it is in the totem numbers—the imaginary correlation between fire-three-and-hire-one and the total of a net reduction of about 54,000 a year. The
original Lummis-Mulvaney bill said they would cut 10% in
two years instead of five, on the same three-out-one-in principle, which shows you that the math is pulled out of the anus.
Best advice for Republicans: Don’t bet that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee. Get started on researching Vice President Biden, who may prove to be a much tougher opponent than the scandal-plagued Clinton.
Oh, Jennifer, you never do fail! The improbability of picking Biden as the candidate to watch matched by the insane hope that there's some scandal about him waiting to be picked up by oppo researchers, after an almost ridiculously public career of 45 years! Keep having passionate sex with that chicken!
Bonus
Carly Fiorina on Hillary Clinton:
Well, let's just start with her comment about a heavily edited video. I mean, I find it fascinating that Planned Parenthood, Emily's List and all the rest of the pro-abortion lobby are now suddenly so concerned about a heavily edited video. I don't recall them ever being concerned about a heavily edited video of, say, Mitt Romney at a fund-raiser. I don't remember them being concerned about Edward Snowden. We've had a lot of things where information has come out that we needed to see....
So, let's talk about -- once again, I'm pro-life as you know, Chris, but there are plenty of pro-choice women who are horrified by this as they should be. And, by the way, after-hours honestly, the fact that these officials can sit here swilling their wine, drinking their salad, laughing over getting a Lamborghini and talking about specimens and fetal tissue, I just find it horrifying --
You can tell Carly's been hitting the cucumbertinis pretty hard herself.
The reason she doesn't remember anybody being concerned about a heavily edited video of Mitt Romney at a fund-raiser is that there wasn't a heavily edited video of Mitt Romney at a fund-raiser. There was an unedited video of Mitt Romney at a fund-raiser, and a sound-bite excerpt about how Romney wasn't interested in campaigning to voters in the 47% of the population who end up after deductions with no federal income tax liability, because he figured they were "takers" who would never vote for him, since all he really had to offer was cuts in federal taxes and the federal services they pay for.
He was wrong, of course, about that, Republicans tragically get lots of votes from poor white people voting out of misdirected rage, as Democrats generally get plenty of votes from the non-poor and well-educated who cast their ballots out of an idea of what's good for the whole country instead of what's in it for me, but anyway. Where Snowden came from in the depths of her unconscious is weird. A little research suggests she actually
does think Snowden did something analagous to video doctoring (which in itself could be sort of arguable, though not the way she argues it):
"I think Edward Snowden has been terribly destructive," she told CNN, but added that agencies could be more transparent. "He has been less than forthcoming. It was a very slanted portrayal about what the NSA does, and he knows it."
So it's an example, like the Planned Parenthood videos, of how it's important to get out information that's false?
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