Literary Corner: New Republican Poetry

"We are already able to reach the notorious hamburgers of San Diego!" Via  Anita Pitsch, Australian National University Press.

Formal elegance meets wry surrealism in some of the new entries, like this Ionesco-like fantasy by Dr. Gorka, from the CPAC conference:

Joe Stalin's Dream

by Dr. Sebastian Gorka

They want
to take your pickup truck,
they want
to rebuild your home,
they want
to take away your hamburgers.

This is what Stalin dreamt
about but never achieved.

Strictly speaking, I don't believe Comrade Stalin had any interest in rebuilding my home at all. I think he would have relished the uncontrollable overheating, the poor ventilation in spite of gaps exploited by wind and rodent, the ceiling fan in which only one of the four light bulb sockets actually works because of some crazy fault in the wiring. He would have seen it as irrefragable evidence of the collapse of the decadent West, as the contradictions of capitalism become too gross to ignore. I don't have a pickup truck, but I doubt he'd be interested in the occasional hamburger I consume, beyond asserting (no doubt falsely) that Soviet hamburgers are much, much better. Just saying.

Dylan Doubles Down

Or quadruples, as the case may be, with a short piece yesterday afternoon and a rather longer one in the evening, inflated to a majestic six-paragraph lede in Mike Allen's morning soufflé—Dylan Byers in Politico, that is, on the theory that the people buying Ted Cruz's book are actual people who know how to read and intend to do it, which this page was amused by yesterday morning.

Did Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins or the Cruz campaign magnify Cruz's sales figures by a laundering scheme, paying individuals to buy the book instead of doing the traditional bulk buy? Byers doesn't ask the question, but reports the HarperCollins non-answer to an easier question:

Art by Brian Gordon via Tech Digest.

He Vox with me and he talks with me

From the Buzzfeed video. 

I wonder if Politico might be on President Obama's shit list down there around Maureen Dowd level, which is I guess pretty much where they belong journalistically, their "Tiger Beat on the Potomac" being just a tad more immature or less sour than her Grudge Report, because they seem awfully put out by the fact that Obama has given two rather large exclusives, on domestic and foreign policy respectively, to those brown-nose Vox jerks Ezra and Matty (you can just imagine Mike Allen: "Policy, policy, all those dudes ever talk about, that's just so gay!").

First Politico ran this review of the interviews, by Jack Shafer, complaining that they aren't adversarial enough:

Players: The Borgia Bunch

Sofonisba Anguissola, Portrait of the Artist's Sisters Playing Chess, 1555, National Museum in Poznań. Images from a 2006 show at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, "At Home in Renaissance Italy".

Here's a story about a man named Borgia...

Moral derpitude

Image via Picy.

Dana Milbank judges the nuclear option severely, though confusedly:

Democrats were fully justified in stripping Republicans of their right to filibuster President Obama’s nominees — yet they will come to deeply regret what they have done.

Why is there Politico?

So the New Yorker Festival is on, and if you were a reasonably educated person of the Upper East Side with nothing better to spend $35 on this morning you could go over to Florence Gould Hall before Bloomingdales opened and hear Ken Auletta interview Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times. So Politico sent their Media correspondent Hadas Gold there—don't know whether she had to get a ticket or not—to apparently think she was reporting a story about Abramson by writing down excerpts from the interview and posting them to Politico in the afternoon, as if she had done the interview herself. [jump]

Horse and jockey by Willard Mullin (1902-78), via CartoonSnap.

Good news for John McCain

Awesome news from Allen & Vandehei at Politico:

Via.

Barack Obama, to hear his advisers tell it, has finally found The One he has been looking for: John McCain. “We have been looking literally for years for someone we can cut deals with, and finally someone has stepped up,” a White House official said. West Wing aides say they now talk with McCain roughly every other day.

How roughly, exactly? I hope they don't hurt the old fellow.

Tweeumphal March

Mark Halperin favorited my Tweet! He must have thought there was something savvy about it. Then he seems to have changed his mind and de-favorited it again. You don't suppose he thought he was being made fun of, do you? Oh well.

@MarkHalperin @adamnagourney Conclusion: Good news for John McCain/
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 15, 2013

Insider Pooper Scoopers: Who're you gonna call?

#Break: Rush Limbaugh may leave Cumulus politico.com/blogs/media/20… via @politico
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) May 6, 2013

Looks like young Dylan got him a Scoop! With anonymous source and all, and writing it up like he's reading it off his Hildy Johnson Junior Journalist Secret Decoder Ring:

The Rush Limbaugh Program is considering ending its affiliation agreement with Cumulus Media at the end of this year, a move that would bring about one of the biggest shakeups in talk radio history, a source close to the show tells POLITICO.

Son of a gun! How did that happen, O source close to the show?

According to the source, Limbaugh is considering the move because Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey has blamed the company's advertising losses on Limbaugh's controversial remarks about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student.

Personal disclosure: My name undoubtedly figures among the petitions to various advertisers asking them to dump the Rushster, so I'm getting a little quiver of We Built That. So is he [jump]

Nerdpron, er, prom, with swagbag of Tweets

Nerd Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. From also smarter-than-she-looks romance novelist Sarah MacLean.

That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) April 28, 2013

No kidding, man. Why, as far as I could tell, nobody mentioned Sarah even once.* [jump]

Beyond the wacky rich

Video: White House Correspondents' Dinner: What it's like to walk the red carpet

Oh, Mikey! You're so—big!

Image from FamousDC.

Before turning to national politics, he covered schools and local governments in rural counties outside Fredericksburg, Va., for The Free Lance-Star, then wrote about Doug Wilder, Oliver North, Chuck Robb and the Bobbitts for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, where he nurtured police sources on overnight ride-alongs through housing projects. Allen also covered Mayor Giuliani, the Connecticut statehouse and the wacky rich of Greenwich for The New York Times.

Response to Politico: Broad Mandate

Emma, Jon Coale, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei. Haddad Media.

If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That’s what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it’s possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.
A broad mandate this is not. Politico 11/4/12.

If Governor Willard Mitt Romney wins, he will be the popular choice of white men.  That's what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks almost certain that he will lose Hispanics, African-Americans, the highly educated, people under 30, and women in general of all races with a much lower percentage than Barack Obama got of middle-aged white men in 2008.

I guess Politico would call that a broad mandate. After all, it includes drinkers of both red and white, and a broad.