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poasterchild — Ta-Ta, Mittens!
Published: 2012-09-29 05:37:02 +0000 UTC; Views: 2051; Favourites: 28; Downloads: 33
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What were the Republicans thinking when they nominated a poster child for the one percent in the very same year Occupy Wall Street made "the one percent" a household word?
But then, what did they have to choose from? A batshit bimbo from Minnesota whose husband thinks you can "pray away the gay?" A blowhard multiple adulterer? A serial sexual predator? A psychotic miasma of steaming santorum who sees nothing abnormal in sleeping with your dead premature baby and introducing him to his living siblings? Another Mormon gazillionaire with inherited money? A Texas Bible-thumper who calls for a statewide day of prayer for rain whom God answers with the worst outbreak of forest and prairie fires in the state's history? Or, a kindly old obstetrician who affiliates with known neo-Nazis and Kluxers?
That's quite a field, but not much of a choice. It will be a shame to see the Republicans drown in an internal war of hate and recrimination. They deserve it. We need to elect in the 2014 Congressional elections at least as many U.S. Representatives as the Tea Party Caucus in the House has today -- about 61 seats. Can we do this in the next two years?
Anyway, here's the link to the ABC News photo: [link]
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Comments: 25
Perhaps it was hubris? Since the 1% had won such stunning victories with the wealth-concentrating effects of the crash & bailouts, and cemented those gains with "austerity", maybe they were irrationaly exuberant? So maybe they sought to rub it in by putting a wall street pirate in the white house? So they backed the poster boy for the theory that, "Capitalism equals rich guys looting companies, loading 'em up with debt and dumping the employees." Perhaps Romney was the insult added to the injury?
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Backing Romney was like the 1% were saying, "Ha, ha! We stole your life savings and your children's future! Now we're gonna rub your faces in it by putting one of us in the White House."
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I think you're right, or very close to it. They were totally tone deaf to the mood of the country. Can you imagine, in the very same year that Occupy Wall Street made "the 1%" a household word, nominating a guy like Romney? They really didn't see it coming, and neither did Romney, who was apparently stunned when the returns came in on election night. Too bad that what we voted for was Romney-lite. I haven't counted it up in while, but prior to the last election, Obama had taken something like $4.5 million in campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms over the course of his political career. And you'll notice that still, not one Wall Street executive has ever been indicted, let alone done any time, for the financial crimes they committed against the rest of us.
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How is this for a theory?
Maybe the sugar-daddy billionaires backing the Republican nominees didn't see Romney’s loss coming because of several seemingly overwhelming advantages - unemployment, anxiety, racism and the ability to trump small donors because of SCOTUS' "Citizen's United" decision.
The "1%" might have been banking on the voters blaming the sitting president for their financial anxieties and forgetting the preceding three decades of deregulation, and 32 years of shifting the tax burden AWAY FROM corporations (and the rich) and TOWARD the middle class.
Conservatives might have been counting on the corporate media’s bias to help the voters to forget/ignore that Republicans blocked or watered down every attempt Obama made to help the economy.
Perhaps assumptions like that were why Romney’s loss blindsided them so badly?
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I think that all of that was part of it.
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As to why Romney didn't see his huge loss coming, I think the guy had two big disadvantages. He spent years living in the right-wing echo chamber and he seems to suffer from a behavioral disorder I like to call “affluenza”.
The feel-good lies that conservatives tell each other, the insulated bubble they choose to live in, the right-wing radio they listen to – all of these can have a blinding effect. Until I realized Romney hadn’t prepared a concession speech (more on that later), I thought the Republican candidates relied on the right-wing echo chamber for persuading voters. I never imagined they believed any of it. But if you believe your own advertising, you’re toast, and it looks like Mitt did.
“Affluenza” is the crippling effect of being raised in privilege when it is coupled with a lack of accountability. I’m sure you will agree that it is not power that corrupts, but immunity. If you have power and you know you will be held accountable, that is one thing. But if you wield power without personal consequences, corruption tends to follow.
Candidate Romney exhibited two of the more common symptoms of advanced affluenza.
1: “It can’t happen to me.” If you are born to privilege, if you never really had pay for your mistakes (Because Daddy or Uncle Sam always bailed you out) then “failure” isn’t a real concept for you. It literally CAN NOT happen to you. It only happens to “lesser” people. Maybe Mitt couldn’t conceive of loosing the election, so that contingency wasn't planned for, therefore there was no need for a concession speech.
I’ve met a few business leaders who didn’t make contingency plans. But unlike Mitt, they didn’t have the connections to get the kind of government bailouts that saved Bain & Company in 1990. All of those business leaders are long gone, because they were held more accountable than Mr. Romney has ever been.
2: Yes-Men are death. (Garbage in = garbage out) If your people are spinning the truth before they report it to you, of course your assumptions will be mistaken. People I’ve known who suffer affluenza are especially vulnerable to this.
Think about it this way: If you’ve always been the boss, its natural for you to treat those around you as subordinates instead of as colleagues. Even worse, too many workers accept the old saw, “We vote in a ‘democracy’ but we work in an autocracy”. Since THEIR job depends on YOUR whim, those people are tempted to tell you what you want to hear instead of telling you the truth.
Too many affluenza-prone people cannot comprehend such a subordinate point of view at all. That's why they don’t make the concerted, continual effort to engender trust or show that such sycophantic behavior is unwelcome. Instead, they welcome that kind of brown-nosing lickspittle behavior. I always found sycophants to be untrustworthy and nauseating, but all too many of of the affluenza-prone bask in the ego-gratifying adulation of sycophants.
Take it from this son of executives and grandson of politicians (and one whose consulting work had him talking directly to his clients' top decision-makers). If you treat your people as subordinates instead of colleagues, if you tolerate sycophantic behavior, if you let anyone tell you what they think you want to hear (instead of the truth) then you are making yourself overly vulnerable to GIGO.
The Romney Campaign was accused of punishing people who tried to report that things weren’t going as planned with their computerized voter-tracking system. The same system which crashed and burned when they needed it most.
Which brings to mind a historical parallel. The ancient Romans believed in protecting themselves from the contaminating aspect of bad luck by killing the bearer of bad news. Eventually no one would bear bad news to an Imperial army’s leader. So several Roman legions marched off to destruction because their leaders had erroneous or incomplete information. Like those Romans, Romney’s campaign suffered from faulty intelligence. Because they choose to live in the right-wing echo chamber instead of the reality-based community. Because they punished people who tried to tell them their program was faulty. Because they allowed their subordinates to tell them what they wanted to hear - which turned those subordinates into yes-men.
Yes-men are death to your efforts. Especially if you terrify the initiative out of them. Just ask those dead Roman Tribunes.
Or Mitt Romney.
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Having worked as a Congressional staffer and as a polling consultant on more than 100 Federal election campaigns, including two Presidential runs, I could not agree with you more. I used to say that my job as a political pollster was akin to that of a psychotherapist -- both jobs involve gentle confrontation in the attempt, often unsuccessful, to inject a little reality into the minds of our clients/patients. Funny, isn't it, that after I got thoroughly disgusted with the self-congratulatory mindset and self-serving behavior of the people who are drawn to politics that I did, in fact, become a psychotherapist?
You, sir, are insightful and eloquent. Let's be friends.
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Yes let's. Thanx for the compliment. Sasly, i am running late for a party so, good bye for today.
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I remember when the Democrats were the conservatives and the Republicans were the liberals.
Actually I don't. Because I didn't live in the 1860's. Still, what the fuck happened?
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The Democrats were mostly progressive back in the 1700s, but by the 19th century, they were the status-quo party of the Educated Elite, Slavery and Secession.
The Republicans were the party of Free Labor, Big Business and Emancipation.
What happened to the Republicans? The financial influence of the Robber Barons eroded their support of labor. A disputed vote-count in Florida followed by a corrupt bargain got Republican Rutherford Hayes elected President, but at the price of Reconstruction and allowing the Democrats to usher in Jim Crow and the KKK.
Then FDR happened to the Democrats. The crisis of the Great Depression enabled him to lead a traditionally conservative party because he was willing to try new ideas to save capitalism from itself while everyone else was either in despair or advocating dictatorship. His cheerful reassurance of the nation frustrated the backers of dictatorship from the right (Douglas MacArthur) or from the left (Huey Long). FDR regulated the hell out of Wall Street, punishing those most visibly responsible for causing the Depression and giving citizens a break from the boom-and-bust cycle that had always plagued the American Economy. That break lasted from 1937 to 1997. (Sadly, we are back in that cycle of Wall Street destroying your life savings every decade or so, thanks mainly to the high priest of de-regulation, Republican Ronald Reagan, and his followers infesting both parties.) FDR got people jobs at the same time a former Republican Treasury Secretary was celebrating Americans' right to choose to starve to death. Is it any wonder that the voters locked the Republicans out of Congressional power for fourty years?
Unlike the tone-deaf plutocrat pliticians of his day, FDR spoke to those most afflicted by the depression, gaining the Democrats much cred with diverse groups like farmers, workers and educated urbanites.
Eleanor Roosevelt pushed the Democrats into trying to woo Black voters away from the Republican Party which had betrayed their fathers. Then Bobby Kennedy convinced his big brother to make gestures of support for the jailed reformer Martin Luther King after the Nixon Campaign very publicly ignored the pleas of King's wife. A few years later, Texas Democrat Lyndon Johnson maneuvered the Civil Rights Act through Congress, at the cost of weakening his own party's southern stronghold.
Then Richard Nixon played the Race Card with his "Southern Strategy" and took the south faway form the Democrats. So the two parties switched geographic location as well as many of their ideologies.
It can be argued that the Democrats still exhibit some lingering affection for workers and education. No one doubts that Republicans are still for Big Business.
Along the way, reactionaries made their feelings knows by assassinating a series of liberal activists and politicians , murdering civil rights workers, ensuring that lynch-mobs never saw justice...and having student protestors massacred by the national guard.
That's how the Party of Lincoln became the party that builds walls on the border and votes state legislation disenfranchising tens of thousands of minority and young voters.
That's how Jefferson Davis' party became the party that chose Barack Obama for the Presidency.
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It would seem we need to stop talking about bringing back Mammoths and ugly birds, and bring back FDR!
Let him clean the country up....AGAIN!
Can we start a grassroots movement or something? "Bring Back FDR?"
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When progressives met with FDR and approved of his progressive aganda. He said something like, "Good! Now get out there and make me do it." Just electing the lesser of two evil choices as your representatives and leaders isn't going to accomplish much, not with how big money's lobbiests have captured the system and the corporate media. You have to go out there and force them to do what's right.
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"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike." - from Speech to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (27 June 1936)
I think that sums up your thoughts.
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Actually, the Democrats were conservative and the Republicans were radical.
Republicans that actually stood for progress, opportunity, and change. Wow, what a difference 150 years make, right?
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As the primary season went through, I thought to myself: Am I watching Comedy Central or an actual presidential race?
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. . .and he's ready to kick ass and take names.
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It was so hilariously entertaining to watch the Republican primaries, as one 'challenger' after another would be promoted by the party to no end in hopes of ousting the highly unfavorable Mitt Romney... only to have EVERY ONE OF THEM fail to such a ridiculous extent that it was hardly believable!
But you did leave one out: the laughably ludicrous Christine O'Donnell (who was being promoted as the Palin-successor), who sent a collective "OH GOD WHAT??" through her party after proclaiming a staunch Anti-Onanism platform - i.e. "we must outlaw masturbation and enforce the laws with FBI surveillance."
I, of course, joined with the crowds of protesters stating "you can have my gun... when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!"
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Romney's a waste of parrot droppings. Even just as a person, he is a complete scumbag; his flesh is dogshit, his soul is dogshit, he IS dogshit.
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OH, I mean the two most tv aired parties. There are others, who though want change, aren't even noticed due to who runs what right now. :[
Love ya!!!
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I feel all parties are full of
SHIT. Everything needs to change. It is changing. <3
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Obama and Romney....both have flaws....I just hope that the next new or next old CnC be aware of those traps of personal powers.
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The only way I see Mitt winning is if the Repubs have one hell of an October Surprise. Given the incompetent chucklefuckery they have shown throughout the years, it'll probably fall flat at best, and at worst completely self-destructing. No, I'm not complacent yet, but the Repubs have been their own worst enemy these past few years.
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