Mid-80s

 

Senator Romney's $15-million Park City ski lodge. After he leaves politics, he won't have to take vacations in Utah any mre

That crack from Willard Mitt Romney announcing his coming retirement from the Senate

“At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-80s,” Romney, who is 76, said. “Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in.”

seems particularly aimed at President Joe Biden, who will himself hit 85 in November 2027, as the 2028 campaign gets underway, as opposed to Romney's personal bête noire, the presumptive Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump, who will be a sprightly 81.

It should be noted that Romney himself wouldn't be in a position to make decisions that might shape the world in any case, as perhaps the dead weakest of all the senators, with no faction and no allies, which is the real reason he's leaving it, as far as I'm concerned, ever since his lonely vote to convict Trump in the first impeachment. Whereas Biden has that job Romney wanted and will never have, with all its privileges and appurtenances, and is making those decisions on a daily basis (something Trump wasn't cognitively able to do, as Romney is well aware, as he told McKay Coppins, dishing about Trump's "warped, toddler-like mentality").

No. 1

From President Medvedev's vlog, via The Guardian, 25 October 2011.

Fred Kaplan of Slate, Rectification Central's go-to source of expertise on military matters, had a better-informed version of something I've been wanting to say, about old Willard Mitt Romney complaining in every quarter about how he deserves an apology, because when he said in 2012 that the Russian Federation was "our no. 1 geopolitical foe" and everybody made fun of him he was actually right. As a matter of fact he wasn't right, in the first place because he was ignorant or lying, as was the case with so much of what Romney was saying* during that campaign:

In his 2012 CNN interview [toward the end of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency, a couple of months before Putin returned to the office in May], Romney explained his characterization of Russia as “our No. 1 geopolitical foe” by saying, “They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors”—and referred specifically to Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria. In his recent Atlantic interview, he said, “They were opposing us at the U.N. whenever a critical measure came forward.” Both statements were simply untrue.

The fact is, quite apart from partisan bickering or revisionist history about the wisdom of Romney, the U.S. and Russia shared vital interests on a number of issues—and acted together to advance those interests, at least for a while. Medvedev and other Kremlin officials were also genuinely keen to bring Russia into the global economy—to diversify its economy beyond commodities like oil and gas, build up its tech sector, and expand its trade—which motivated them to build better relations with America and Europe.

More specifically, and more importantly in terms of the campaign, he was wrong to suggest that there was some deep defect in the Obama administration's treatment of the US-Russia relationship during the Medvedev presidency, the proof being in what he was able to achieve:

Kamala

Don't know about you but I have no intention of trying to #resist this. I'm all the way in.

https://t.co/HbmmRbkVNU https://t.co/S7eOgFJG3g

— President “ramble-parade of lies and boasts” (@realworldrj) August 11, 2020

Harris's undergrad degree is from Howard, which Republicans will probably complain is inside the Beltway, and JD from the University of California at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco—Biden, of course, went to the University of Delaware and got his law degree at Syracuse. So not merely no Ivy degrees but two state school degrees between them. Somehow this is the most moving for me.

Also, Harris is the first Asian American and the first Caribbean American and the first first-generation child of immigrants on both sides nominee, and the first one with a Jewish spouse, making her a veritable feast of intersectionality. And like everybody else I can't wait to see her use those debate chops we've seen at Senate Judiciary hearings on poor Michael Pence.

This was certainly the best choice Biden had, probably inevitable but certainly pleasing. Rose Twitter calling her a cop and the Trump machine calling her a radical leftist who has captured poor Joe in her bloody claws more or less cancel each other out. Her own ideas have advanced since she was a DA—she's the second-most leftist member of the Senate, according to the DW-Nominate system, which TBH doesn't give you the results Chuck Todd or Rose Twitter might offer, which got me into a hilarious Twitter war the other day:

Extremism in the defense of moderation is no...

...oxymoron,  I guess.

I just remembered Brooks wrote most of yesterday's column five years ago, during the Obama-Romney contest, down to the reference to the Romanian-named political scientist who is at the current forefront of Moderation Studies. It seemed funnier then, and I thought I'd rerun the parody I did, just for fun.

Dim sum from China Max, San Diego.

David Brooks writes (27 October 2012):

Ever since the debate season began, Mitt Romney has been running hard after those moderate voters, lining out a new area of agreement with Obama at every turn. Obama, in contrast, has been disagreeing with Romney—but I took a look at the interview he inadvertently gave the Des Moines Register, which I thought was supposed to be scandalous, and found to my amazement that for the white and elderly-trending population of the Quad Cities he was peddling a fairly moderate agenda for the second term there. Evidently he's trying to keep his moderation quiet on the coasts, where it might cost him votes. And I figured that meant I would be able to hack together a column explaining what moderates are with only two tabs open on the browser, so here goes.

In the first place, moderation is not attained by establishing two extreme points on an opinion scale and then situating yourself at the midpoint between them. Anybody who thinks that is a helpless fool who should probably be enjoined from using a fork, really, if only for their own protection.

Nor is moderation some kind of abstract philosophical position, such as a person might learn about from reading Aristotle and committing herself to an abstract ideal of not being excessive in either direction. Only an idiot would say that. To understand moderation, in fact, you have to read history, and understand that America is a nation of immigrants whose parents worked hard and played by the rules so their children could go to college and graduate into a decent job; and a reverence for this country and the Founders who planned it that way.

Emperor Trump, continued

Image via Alabama Today, from a story on the nomination of Tom Price (R-GA) as secretary of destroying the Affordable Care Act. I have no idea why they ran this particular shot, unless Kellyanne wrote a song about it.

So it's my theory—trigger warning, this might make you feel a little sick—that the Romney concept really belongs to Barack Obama, as part of the Trump Whispering campaign.

Yes, I'm old enough to remember when Romney owned the world record for political lies per minute (about 0.76), but that was back in ancient times, before a presidential campaign in which Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Carly Fiorina, some of the most prolific and dedicated liars in US history, making the Mittster look like a gentleman amateur, were themselves completely outclassed by the winning candidate, our president-elect, who reached the stunning rate of a lie every 50 seconds (1.2 lies per minute) during the presidential debates. (Oh, and both sides do it, because Hillary Clinton once said she landed under sniper fire in Sarajevo in 1996, which was not true, but then Brian Williams, who seems to have claimed to have spent pretty much his entire life under sniper fire, still has a job as a news broadcaster, so who knows what it all means.)

Douthat, just saying: His angst evident in his hair

Macy's bone structure is completely different, but he could capture some of the psychotic character of Bill Kristol.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, does something really peculiar ("The Dying of the Third-Party Dream"):

Of all the strange images of this strange campaign, I find myself particularly struck by this vision: Mitt Romney, pacing alone in one of his many houses, his angst evident in his faintly mussed-up hair, placing pleading phone calls to Republican politicians asking them to run as a third-party candidate against Donald Trump.

That bizarre, existential one-act play — “Conversations About Trump,” opening Off Broadway, with Josh Brolin as Romney and the voice of William H. Macy as John Kasich — is apparently where the quest for a conservative alternative to Trump and Hillary Clinton ran into a wall.

I'm an idiot about celebrity news, so it didn't occur to me that that bit was meant rhetorically, and I was quite disappointed when the link led not to further information on this imaginary play but to a dumb insider article about Republicans in the Washington Post, by Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, the GOP's earnestly savvy ambassador to the wider world. And Dr. Google couldn't uncover any information about Conversations about Trump either.

Cheap shot: Some Republicans lie, some Republicans *really* lie

Image via NoShootFoot.

From David F. Brooks's passionate denunciation of Donald J. Trump, a detail I thought was pretty cute:

This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes.

Then again, Willard Mitt Romney scored a rate of 27 lies in 38 minutes in the debate of October 3 2012, for a rate of a lie every 1.4 minutes, so Trump has a long way to go before he approaches the record. 

Help him make it through the night

Man walks into a... Drawing by Garrad at DrawCeption.

World-famous cornpone philosopher David Brooks works out a homespun fable ("It's not too late!", New York Times, March 8 2016):

It’s 2 a.m. The bar is closing. Republicans have had a series of strong and nasty Trump cocktails. 

Wait, in this analogy Trump is something you drink? And probably shouldn't, like very cheap tequila?

Cheap shots but not *that* cheap

Sully, via YouTube.

Paying my respects to the late

I have to say when Andrew Sullivan said in January 2013 that his readers would have to fork over $20 a year to partake of his Dish I respected that.

In fact I respected it enough to not go over there, standing on my own principle that nothing he wrote could possibly be worth that much, or any, money, except once in a great while when driven by the exigencies of some Brooksological problem (because Brooksy definitely dipped into Sully from time to time for the heavyweight intellectual material, including for his epic tour of early 20th-century Russian philosophy and his tragically doomed attempt to grasp the thinking of the psychoanalyst Adam Philipps). If it was really important to him, I figured, to keep his readership down to the class of those who were willing to commit, I'd stay away.

Sunday night cheap shot

Snarkists everywhere say, "Yes! Yes!"

Just couldn't resist sharing—famed celebrity fiction writer Edward Klein, writing in conservative fanzine New York Post, has been hearing voices, sorry rumors, that the Mittster is tanned and rested (he was always those) and ready too, having suddenly mastered all those pesky issues after eight years of not quite getting there:

“The smart folks in the party are not committed to any presidential candidate this early,” said Scott Reed, the senior political strategist for the US Chamber of Commerce, the powerful business lobby that has scored a string of establishment victories over Tea Party candidates in this year’s Republican primaries. “But Romney can’t be dismissed as the guy who lost last time.

“You watch him on TV these days, and he’s a new guy with total command of the issues and a real presence,” Reed added. “He could throw an organization together and get the money.”

Hey, I didn't know Mormons believed in the Real Presence.

One anonymous "wealthy New York–based Republican" told Klein,

“Most of the people I talk to who are involved in Republican politics as donors want a winner.”

And you know how to recognize a winner, right?

It's easy! Just watch Fox.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Mazel Tov, America, on Your Adorable New Program!

Via.

Atrios:

Except for the fact that he beat them twice, conservative really don't have any reason to hate Obama. "Obamacare" is just the Heritage Foundation health care plan, aka Romneycare, and otherwise, uh, what?

With all due respect to the Sweet Sage of the Eschatonic—and that's more respect than you want to be carrying around most of the time—I think we need to rethink that piece of received wisdom: [jump]

I feel your Bain

Everybody's piling on Marc Thiessen's piecelet in the Washington Post, but I just can't help myself:

Mitt Romney was not the cool candidate. He ran on competence. But having the data system your campaign is relying on to turn out the vote crash on Election Day is incompetent. Not testing that system before Election Day is inexcusable. And letting a community organizer run a more precise, data-driven, metrics-based campaign than a Bain Capital executive is incomprehensible.

No, as Booman says, incomprehensible is not exactly the word for it.  "Comprehensible" might be better, or "unsurprising", or, "exactly what you'd expect". Obama's work experience is just a lot more relevant than Romney's. There's a reason they call it community organizing: because it consists of organizing communities, which is exactly what a political campaign needs to do. Bain Capital executives may dazzle you with numbers, but they don't use them in that way.

Modern Mechanix, July 1929.

For instance, also from Booman,

There are still some votes to count but as of right now Mitt Romney has 58,777,012 votes. In 2008, John McCain received 59,934,814 votes. So, Rich Beeson is telling the National Review with a straight face that his team turned out the votes they needed to win according to their own models even though they turned out 1.2 million fewer voters than John McCain did four years ago. John McCain lost by 9.5 million votes, and Romney turned out 1.2 million less than that. Basically, John Beeson is saying that his model indicated that Romney could get approximately 11 million fewer votes than McCain needed to tie, despite population growth over the last four years, and that he would be in a perfect position to beat the president.

Rich Beeson's "model" isn't a campaign handicapper's model of how a candidate wins. It's "we did something right two years ago, so let's assume we're still doing it." I don't think they have a clue what works, except, ironically, that they recognize the value of "throwing money at the problem". Rove's famous math is just the same this year as it was when his candidates won. Terrorist irredentist Belgian imperialist Newt Gingrich still thinks he won the 1994 midterms with his "contract for America" even though hardly any voters had heard of it. Except for the money part, which really does do something (just as it does in improving schools, countering poverty, and what not), the business is basically a fraud.

I was also interested to learn that Ph.D. candidate and soccer mom Paula Broadwell, deciding to write a book instead of her dissertation, got literary by hiring a ghost writer, Vernon Loeb. That is, what she wanted specifically was to be not just a biographer, but a society biographer. It's not that she didn't work damn hard, flying around the world and interviewing everybody she could, it's just that she didn't work in a small and silent room. There had to be a minimum-wage peon to transcribe the interviews, and a handsomely paid Loeb to stitch the paragraphs together.

What I wanted to say was, it's not so much the case I tend to imagine, that bosses really don't know what work is; that's too simple. But their model of it, the image of work that lives with the word in their minds, isn't of making or maintaining or fixing or understanding things—it's advertising and marketing—it's making things look more valuable than they actually are. That's what the numbers do in private equity.

So Romney hired pollsters that would make him look like a winner, not even realizing that he might want to know to what extent he really was a winner or not at any given point in time. It would be sad if it wasn't so funny.

Cleveland model and fashion photographer—yellow. By Pazza Photography.

Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but elections

Updated 12/28/12:

Hipster Reagan. From FunnyJunk.

David Brooks writes:

The American colonies were first settled by religious dissenters in search of a place where they could exercise their liberty of conscience, at least if they were Pennsylvania; or where they could exercise their liberty of conscience and also order everybody else to exercise it in the same way, in the case of Massachusetts. I guess New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were similarly settled by exiles fleeing in the same way from the tyranny of Massachusetts, and you could say Maryland was settled by religious dissenters searching for a place where they could obey the Pope without fear of contradiction, so that's nearly half.

And then when they could no longer fix the horizons in an unobstructed flinty gaze, they moved on toward Buffalo and Cleveland, where they invented Seymour Martin Lipset (the founder of cleavage theory) and his American Creed of liberty, non-fraternity or only-childism, equality of opportunity (but not of outcomes), populism for landlords, and regulation for tenants (also known as laissez-faire economics). And out in the great West they had their own version of the Creed, developed by the great ranchers like Theodore Roosevelt, Gene Autry, and Ralph Lauren; even George W. Bush turned his flinty eyes from Greenwich to go to high school in West Texas (his eyes went flinty at an unusually early age), where he eventually purchased a property for hobbyist brush cutting, which was his own way of thinking individual, great thoughts.

This was no radical Ayn Rand type of individualism. Such men often went to church, took good care of their families, made private and tax-deductible contributions to the needs of the less fortunate, and helped out with school soccer. But they did not feel very comfortable around government, even when they were running it themselves out of a sense of ancestral duty and to make sure the railroad company bought this certain otherwise useless spot of land and other housekeeping details of the sort which you could hardly trust to a bunch of hired attorneys. Left to itself, government might start doling out favors to trade unions, ballet companies, and what Representative Steve King once referred to as the "very, very urban"—to people who did not subscribe to the American Creed at all!

Such people, they argued, really need to be governed, whereas if you try to govern us, with our precious individual initiative, you will just be bleeding out the veins of what made this country great. And that was the pitch on which the general election of 2012 was fought. I wasn't going to mention it—the pain is still too vivid—but there it is. And in places still inhabited by the dissenting Protestants of Old Massachusetts—the Latter-Day Saints, Conference of Southern Baptists (Retired), American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Conference of Catholic Bishops—this approach was just right. But elsewhere, in communities dominated by Congregationalists and Unitarians, Methodists and Presbyterians, Quakers and contraceptionist-schismatic Catholics, it fell flat on its face. Is there something wrong with this picture?

Ah, yes—I forgot about immigrants. Willard Mitt Romney himself comes from an old Mexican ranchero family, but many immigrants do not share that heritage. I'm referring to people not from England, who did not come here to exercise their liberty of conscience, but rather to escape from joblessness, starvation, pogroms, lunatic dictators, and military conscription. These do not necessarily believe in the American Creed; and yet, strangely enough, they do believe in working and getting as rich as they possibly can.

If conservatives are to recover from the current malaise, we will have to do something to get these people to vote for us. When Asian-American and Hispanic voters look at our country and try to figure out what's stopping them from working and getting rich, government isn't the first thing they think of, according to studies by the Pew Research Center. They have more exotic problems, like not being able to afford college, or never getting a raise from their employer, or living in neighborhoods where there is literally not enough government, as in police, trash collection, and parks maintenance. In their world, government is actually a kind of Good Thing.

I know, people that different from you and me are going to be hard to communicate with. What we need is more social scientists, people who can penetrate these neighborhoods and find out what we can offer to get them on our side. If letting all their sisters and their cousins and their aunts across our borders isn't going to be enough, what is? Our survival as a Creed may depend on it.

Image from ReMezcla.

Update:

Swift fans, vagabonds, and fellow honorees: Thanks for dropping by, make yourselves at home, and come again soon. It's an honor and a pleasure.

Antique vaudeville slapstick or batocchio. From Dragon Wings Costume Accessories.

Dirty Hippies for Obama

I kept planning to make a big Election Eve hortatory post, but really, it isn't what we need.

Via Digby:
Peggy's feeling it:

While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. He’s quietly rising, and he’s been rising for a while.

This made Digby think of, putting it delicately, if it's been going on for four hours he should call the doctor. I just saw bread dough, and thought of what happens when you punch it: whoosh!

From TwoYolks.

RIP the great American composer Elliott Carter, who just died aged 103. Don't be sad, right? Celebrate! He had a wonderful life, worked to the end, and it didn't need to be any longer. And we got the music.

Photo by Meredith Heuer via The Guardian.

@heritage I know! I know! It's a very rare matching period, Koch Brothers have offered to match every vote you cast with one of their own.
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) November 6, 2012

Oh yes, I'm voting for Obama. Just watched the Des Moines speech ending with a superb version of the story of "Fired up? Ready to go?" A South Carolina story, so he told it in the rhythm of the southern raconteur, stretched to the limit, what joy.

Are you fired up? Are you ready to go? Vote!

P.S. I was telling my daughter about Obama calling the banksters "fat cats" and hurting their feelings. She said, "He should have called them full-figured."

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.

It's always projection, but sometimes it's nuts

One example, still pretty new, succinctly summed up by Charles Blow:

[Romney] criticized Obama for telling then-President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia that he would have “more flexibility” to deal with sensitive issues between the two countries after he won re-election. Romney said this was particularly troubling given that Russia “is without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe.” 

However, according to a report on Friday in The New York Times, Romney’s son Matt recently traveled to Russia and delivered a message to President Vladimir Putin: 

“Mr. Romney told a Russian known to be able to deliver messages to Mr. Putin that despite the campaign rhetoric, his father wants good relations if he becomes president, according to a person informed about the conversation.”

Image by Dan Lacey, the Painter of Pancakes. From Faithmouse.

 Then there's the idiotic claim that

"Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China," the ad's narrator says. "Mitt Romney will fight for every American job"

—so patently false that even CBS News doesn't bother trying to he-said-she-said it. Not as widely known is the fact that somebody really did make some money off the auto bailout by shipping jobs to China, including Mr. and Mrs. Romney, as detailed by Greg Palast in this week's Nation.

This has to do with Delphi Automotive, a former GM subsidiary that became independent and went bankrupt in 2005, all the while continuing to be indispensable as a parts supplier both to GM and Chrysler. Before they'd cooperate with Obama's task force on saving the auto industry, the hedge funds that were now in charge of Delphi demanded an up-front payment of $350 million, just to start negotiating. They ended up moving production to China, cutting more than 25,000 US union jobs, as the price of keeping GM and Chrysler alive. And one of those hedge funds was Paul Singer's Elliott Management, where Ann Romney's "blind trust" put at least a million dollars (in return, Singer has contributed $3.4 million to Republicans this year). Her ROI for the bailout is at least $15.5 million.

Holy Trinity Church, Hinton-in-the-Hedges, Nhants. Wikipedia.

Finally, voter fraud, and the threat of voter fraud by freed felons, undocumented immigrants, Donald Duck and the Bavarian Illuminati, I mean Democrats, which has kept everybody's Republican state legislatures so busy this year, and then it turns out that everybody that's actually involved with committing voter fraud from the Breitbart factory to Nathan Sproul's Strategic Allied Consulting (paid $3 million this season, an awful lot for taking out the trash when you don't even do it right) seems to be a Republican. In Ohio the attempt to steal the election is pretty much undisguised.

All in all, then, it's a good thing Romney is calling Obama a crony capitalist; I mean, you know exactly how to interpret it. What would be scary would be if he started calling a Obama a socialist—how would you want to vote then?

Cheap tricks and tweets

Romney in Iowa (prepared text of a speech in Ames, via Political Animal):

Four years ago, candidate Obama spoke to the scale of the times. Today, he shrinks from it, trying instead to distract our attention from the biggest issues to the smallest—from characters on Sesame Street and silly word games to misdirected personal attacks he knows are false.

I.e., Big Bird and word games are the big issues, personal attacks are the small ones. Or it it the other way around? He's the one who brought up Big Bird, he must have thought it was important at the time. Then again most of the misdirected personal attacks Obama knows are false are directed against Obama, aren't they?

A lie in this speech I hadn't seen before, about

the college student, graduating this spring, with 10 to 20 thousand dollars in student debt, who now learns that she also will be paying for 50 thousand dollars in government debt, a burden that will put the American Dream beyond her reach.

Obama's going to make us all pay our share of the national debt?

From MIT, Gangnam style in one of its funnier versions, with an appearance by Professor Noam Chomsky (at 3:20) totally stealing the show, via Language Log.

It's the first snowflake of the season!

@rumsfeldofficeHey Uncle Donald don't judge government bureaucracies by what happened when you ran them.
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 31, 2012

The assistant secretary tried to defend herself, but there were too many of them. From The Fun Times Guide.

A wonderful device by Dylan Matthews and Ezra Klein, Romney's Revenue Meter, allows you to play games with Romney's tax cut numbers, instantly working out how you could make them work out by eliminating this or that deduction or tax expenditure or adding this or that tax, though not of course by doing anything Romney says he's prepared to do.  Of no use in arguing with the proverbial obnoxious brother-in-law (for the record, I have three brothers-in-law and not one of them would vote for Romney)—he would just deny the assumptions.

The Heritage Foundation discovered a flaw in the logic behind wind energy: turns out that the wind doesn't always blow.

Installing Windmills Doesn’t Make the Wind Blow. Here's what @dwkreutzer has to say: herit.ag/SxtXE5
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) October 31, 2012

Jeez, those stupid scientists never thing of anything!

Happy Halloween! On West End Avenue, I just saw a mom in "binders full of women" costume. It was nowhere near as fancy as these Ohio ladies, but a pleasant sight all the same.

From Talking Points Memo.

The upside of down

Shorter David Brooks:

Since Romney is totally free of principles, he'd make a much more effective president than Obama.

Today he's Mr. Savvy, building a picture of how the legislative wheels would turn under the two different candidates, which he can totally do, thanks to his vast experience of sitting around the table with George Stephanopoulos and John McCain.

"Cliffs of Insanity" (The Princess Bride): The Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland.

He still hasn't found out, though, that we are scheduled to tumble into that fiscal abyss almost three weeks before the inauguration:

The first order of business would be the budget deal, averting the so-called fiscal cliff. Obama would first go to Republicans in the Senate and say, “Look, we’re stuck with each other. Let’s cut a deal for the sake of the country.” He would easily find 10 Republican senators willing to go along with a version of a Grand Bargain.

Well, the fiscal cliff will have been averted already by then, if it is going to be averted, by the old congress, as Obama insists it will. And if it hasn't been, we'll all be dragging our shattered limbs across the fiscal canyon floor, praying for rescue, and the mood in the Senate is going to be rather anxious, with the horrified calls coming not just from Medicare patients and library users but also from their dear friends in the arms and aerospace industries.

But let that pass.

Then Obama would go to the House. He’d ask Eric Cantor, the majority leader, if there were votes for such a deal. The answer would probably be no. Republican House members still have more to fear from a primary challenge from the right than from a general election challenge from the left. Obama is tremendously unpopular in their districts.

Again this difficulty with understanding time. It's going to be a newly elected House, at the moment of the term when the members are least concerned with primary challenges, and with more Democrats and fewer tea-o-phytes, all interpreting the results of their elections in ways that we cannot easily predict. Cantor may have mounted his coup effort against Boehner and become Speaker, or lost and become Nobody—Paul Ryan may have lost his seat!

And not all of them are going to be the same kind of Republican:

Just 45 of 83 of the Republican National Congressional Committee's current crop of so-called Young Guns have signed the no-tax pledge this election season, according to a Huffington Post analysis of pledge signatures. During the 2010 midterm elections, 81 of 92 of that Young Guns group signed the pledge.

Indeed, even the current crop has been entertaining some of that agonizing reappraisal, which is why the lame duck congress, as it will be next week, is working to make the fiscal precipice go away.

Anyway, Brooks expects this process to lead to a situation where little will get accomplished:

By running such a negative presidential campaign, Obama has won no mandate for a Grand Bargain. Obama himself is not going to suddenly turn into a master legislative craftsman on the order of Lyndon Johnson.

There’d probably be a barrage of recriminations from all sides. The left and right would be consumed with ire and accusations. Legislators would work out some set of fudges and gimmicks to kick the fiscal can down the road. The ensuing bitterness would doom any hopes for bipartisan immigration reform.

Ah, yes, of course! The old metaphorical switcheroo: transform that cliff into a can, and then all you need to do is kick it—by the time it turns back into a cliff we'll be campaigning for the next election.

And of course it's Obama's own fault anyway, with his awful negative campaigning. And being too fastidious to keep their peckers in his pocket (can't blame him on that one: I use my pockets). Instead of following their natural inclination to cooperate and make the world a better place, they will be provoked into sulking and getting nothing done at all, quite unlike their predecessors of the 112th Congress (for which Obama scarcely campaigned at all, negatively or otherwise, fearful of giving the impression that he liked Democrats better).

The rest of the Obama second term would be about reasonably small things: some new infrastructure programs; more math and science teachers; implementing Obamacare; mounting debt; a president increasingly turning to foreign affairs in search of legacy projects. If you’re a liberal Democratic, this is an acceptable outcome. Your party spent 80 years building the current welfare state. This outcome extends it.

"A liberal Democratic"? Brooks, you've gone and put the copy editor to sleep again!

Møns Klint, Denmark. Wikipedia.

And then if Romney is elected the situation is the other way around—he can make a deal with the House, to

take the reform agenda that Republican governors have pursued in places like Indiana and take it to the national level: structural entitlement reform; fundamental tax reform. These reforms wouldn’t make government unrecognizable...

but he'll have trouble with the Democratic-led Senate, and not only that: he'll be aware that he only won the election because he decided on Moderation at the last minute, while the Tea-ocrats lost in their Senate races in 2010 and "possibly" (Brooks thinks) this year; and he'll realize that he'll have a hard time repeating the feat in 2016, what with all the hordes of brown persons taking over the country and the diminution of the Republican family. But that won't faze Willard! He'll just make use of his Protean mind-shifting skills, and offer them something akin to Obama's historic compromise:

Romney’s shape-shifting nature would induce him to govern as a center-right moderate. To get his tax and entitlement reforms through the Democratic Senate, Romney would have to make some serious concessions: increase taxes on the rich as part of an overall reform; abandon the most draconian spending cuts in Paul Ryan’s budget; reduce the size of his lavish tax-cut promises. 

This would be startling to conservatives, and talk-show hosts would foam at the mouth, but the Republicans of the House wouldn't mind a bit:

Republicans in Congress would probably go along. They wouldn’t want to destroy a Republican president. Romney would champion enough conservative reforms to allow some Republicans to justify their votes.

Q.E.D.! if you like the Obama program, you should vote for Romney, because he's the guy who's capable of pushing it through: dropping punctuation in his excitement (wake up, copy editor!), he perorates:  

He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans.

Which may or may not be true. As far as that Broderian parody of Obama's program goes, unburdened by any actual beliefs as to what government ought to do, he is perfectly capable of adopting any program whatever, if he thinks it means victory in the Risk game of life. (Most men who get rich on that level want to pick up a trophy wife; Willard, who isn't that way inclined—isn't it odd how Mormons have no interest in serial polygamy, even though it's perfectly legal?—keeps looking for trophy jobs.)

But I don't think that 's what would happen. My feeling—when I think about that tax cut plan, and everybody running around saying, "Well, you'll have to raise taxes on the middle class! You'll have to cut defense! You'll have to reduce Medicare!" and Romney just smiling, perfectly certain that these awful things will not happen—is that it's basically more Bush, doubling and tripling the deficit, and hoping his friends on network TV don't call him out.

As for Brooks, it is really remarkable how clueless he is. (But if the copy editor can't stay awake through his column, maybe nobody at the Times can...)

Steep Cliffs at Dieppe. Claude Monet.

Any fish bite if you got debate

Drones

Bob Schieffer actually did, contrary to all expectation, ask a drone question, but he asked Romney instead of Obama. Romney, sticking with his basic strategy for the evening, quickly agreed that Obama was right about whatever it was Romney didn't want to talk about and started talking about something else, how Iran is "four years closer to a nuclear weapon" etc. Obama was glad to pick up that baton and start running with it further away than ever. Oh well.

I don't understand why Obama doesn't mention that Iran is not "four years closer" to building a nuclear weapon—since they have converted a large proportion of their 20% enriched uranium to solid form, for use in the medical reactor, they are strictly speaking a good deal further away.

Kandahar airfield. Photo by GlobalPost vis PBS.

Geeky linguistic sidelight:

@mattyglesias had an issue during the debate that wasn't really about foreign policy:

Inconsistency between Obama's pronunciation of "Pakistan" and "Afghanistan" always drives me nuts.
— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 23, 2012

That used to bother me too, the way he says the heavy vowels in "Pakistan" the way they say can't in the UK and in "Afghanistan" the way we say can't in the US—until I heard myself doing pretty much the same thing.

Now I think I know what it's about. "Pakistan" is a relatively new word, coming into general use only after the country itself came into existence in 1947; "Afghanistan" is an older one, known to English speakers since maybe the mid-18th century (first official UK use was 1801). So it's had time to evolve a universal English pronunciation whereas "Pakistan" has not. I imagine younger people like Matty (that's what his Twitter address always makes me think of, "Matty Glesias") are more likely to pronounce the two the same way. Just as my grandmother used to pronounce "endive" in French—it was still an exotic vegetable to her, but to me it sounded hysterically bourgeois.

The afghan Emir Sher Ali Khan with his "friends" Russia and Great Britain. Punch, November 30, 1878

Route to the sea

Romney earned a lot of laughs with his strange concept of Middle East geography:

Syria is Iran's only ally in the Arab world. It's their route to the sea. It's the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally Israel. And so seeing Syria remove Assad is a very high priority for us. Number two, seeing a — a replacement government being responsible people is critical for us. And finally, we don't want to have military involvement there. We don't want to get drawn into a military conflict. (Transcript from NPR)

First, of course, Iran doesn't need a route to the sea, since it has plenty of coastline of its own; and secondly Syria is not its route to anywhere, on account of the countries between the two, Iraq and Turkey.

However, in Romney's defense, he's not the only one: a lot of highly respectable people believe this without being aware that they believe it: those who discuss how Iran supplies the Hezbollah militia with arms. I used to wonder a lot about this, during the Iraq war, every time I'd see a story about it: how did they get the stuff across Iraq, when Iraq was occupied by US troops?

Duh. That's the answer. Iraqis allow them to, and the US can't do anything about it (the administration has been entreating Maliki to close the air corridor, without success). It is because of the Iraq war that Iran is able to send arms to Syria and Lebanon. Iran did not have a route to the Mediterranean, but George W. Bush gave them one. One of his many little gifts.

The Mechanics of Destruction cartoon series, by Vincent Kelly (I'm pretty sure Gideon is UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, but it was mainly the headline and the woman I liked)

Schrödinger's foreign policy

Schrödinger's cat T-shirt, from Zazzle.ca.

Here's one of those observer's paradox moments, caught just as it was happening last night, beginning with a startling Twitter exchange:

Yes, God forbid: RT @lrozen WH denies NYT story: "It’s not true that US & Iran have agreed to 1-on-1 talks or any meeting after US election"
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 20, 2012

Meaning, of course this Times story must be wrong, because although Obama has repeatedly asserted that he would agree to bilateral talks with Iran, we all know he can't mean it, since he is actually a fiendish and unregenerate warmonger.

But when I looked at the Times story, that's not at all how I saw it. In the first place, they didn't seem to think the denial was very significant: they dropped it into the sixth paragraph of a pretty long piece, like a police crowd estimate or some other untrustworthy factoid that has to be included, without comment (Ryan Cooper must feel the same; he doesn't even mention the denial; Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Liberman prays that the denial is true). In other words, they treated the denial as an inevitable pro forma element of the story and stood by the story itself.

The White House denied that a final agreement had been reached. “It’s not true that the United States and Iran have agreed to one-on-one talks or any meeting after the American elections,” Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, said Saturday evening. He added, however, that the administration was open to such talks, and has “said from the outset that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally.”

Reports of the agreement have circulated among a small group of diplomats involved with Iran.

(Emptywheel notes that the story first appeared without the sixth paragraph, which was inserted after the White House denial was published in various other places; the wording "until after the American elections" suggests to her that the negotiations have in fact already begun, with Secretary of State Clinton in the lead.)

And then the Times story isn't, after all, that the US and Iran are going to have direct bilateral talks on the nuclear issue—it's that certain unidentified US officials say they will, so that the immediate question is: why are they saying so? And it's easier to come up with an answer if you stipulate that what they are saying is more or less true.

Because why exactly would they be lying about it? If they're working for the president's agenda, are they trying to set it up as an item for Monday's debate? Because peace with Iran is such an irresistible vote-getter in Colorado and Virginia? That's hard to believe. Then again, another denial-denier, Anshel Pfeffer for Haaretz, proposes exactly that:

If indeed the report is accurate, despite the administration's denial (which came with the intriguing caveat that the Americans "have said from the outset that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally"), the winners and losers in the high-stakes nuclear showdown are already clear.

[Obama] began his first term promising to engage the Iranians diplomatically, and though the talks will only begin after the elections, at least he can point to some sort of progress. The specific timing of the leak, on the eve of the third and final presidential debate which is to deal with foreign policy issues is rather suggestive.... Naturally, this is already being spun as an achievement for the administration – finally overcoming Iran's opposition to direct talks.

Other winners, in this view, would include Ayatollah Khamenei, the Israeli security establishment which thinks Binyamin Netanyahu's Iran policy is dangerously insane, and Ehud Barak, currently positioning himself to replace Netanyahu; losers would be Netanyahu himself, his American-Adelsonian surrogate Willard Mitt Romney, who thinks the president of the United States is a proconsul of the Israeli Empire, and Lady Catherine Ashton, the ineffective chief of the European Union and the P5 + 1 talks. To which I would add Mr. Ahmadinejad, who is clearly not going to get any credit for this development with Iranian voters (because we constantly forget that Iran is in its weird way a democracy, and that the Ayatollah probably hates Ahmadinejad as much as he does any of the country's pesky liberals).

So we'd be looking at a very carefully planned leak functioning as an October surprise for Adelson, Netanyahu, and poor Willard. Assuming that the American war fatigue extends to wars that haven't even properly started yet, and that Aipac's or Likud's hold over our politics has really diminished over the past four years. What I don't get is how it works: doesn't Obama have to repeat the denial at the foreign policy debate? If it's officially untrue, how exactly do the Democrats use it?

For that we'll have to wait and see. But to respond automatically, as Greenwald does, on the basis of the assumption that Obama is an agent of Empire and everything he does must be interpreted in that light, is just as short-sighted, if not as stupid, as Drs. D'Souza and Gingrich assuming Obama is an agent of the Mau-Mau party bent on destroying King Leopold and so forth. Nobody's locked into position, but what they say has a relationship, however complex, with what they mean, and the way we watch the situation affects how it develops.

Image by Ooklah at DeviantArt.

Later that afternoon:
Richard Silverstein cites a new Brookings poll according to which a majority of Americans, 53%, would prefer to take a neutral view in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran, as against 12% who would encourage it and 29% who would oppose. So maybe we're ready to make that deal.