Another Era, A Different Planet

People talk about closing Gitmo like the prison itself is the problem, and everything will be okay if we just move the prisoners to nice little facility here on the mainland.  You see a lot of liberals making this argument because it lets them crow about how “Obama wanted to close Gitmo, but those nasty old Republicans wouldn’t let him!”  In other words, nothing is ever Obama’s fault, yet again.  Never mind that his “closure” involved shipping the detainees wholesale to a new facility in Illinois, where the indefinite imprisonment and torture could quietly continue.

Once more for the cheap seats: Gitmo is not the problem.  Indefinite detention is the problem.  Moving the prisoners from Gitmo to the U.S solves nothing.

The only solution is to let them go.

That special night when our vile political class and craven, fawning media get to stop pretending that they’re actually doing their jobs.

OR…

A roll call of everybody in Washington who ought to be marched right to the guillotine.

OR…

The hottest porn you’ll ever see on cable TV.

Remember when the McCain campaign ran those ads about Obama being a “vain celebrity” in August 2008?  They got a little traction as I recall, but at the time I thought they were ridiculous and desperate.

Looking at this budget fracas, maybe McCain was onto something.  It seems like Obama, on some level, really believes his own press.  He really bought into all that messianic crap the left slathered on him in the election.  The comparisons to Kennedy, the Christ imagery, the (let’s be honest) cult of personality…I really think he buys it.  I think he’s started thinking of himself as the great Postpartisan Politician, the grand Compromiser, the lord high Uniter who can make everyone see his shining vision of a perfectly centrist, utterly technocratic America.  It’s one of the only ways to explain the utter insanity of his budget decisions, and his apparently genuine surprise that someone might object to them.

Who knows, maybe McCain saw it first.

Let me take off the outrage cap for a moment and just marvel at how bumblefuck useless the White House has been on this budget issue.

They release this budget which meddles with the untouchable third rail of politics in this country.  They have to know that every attempt to do this has failed miserably and resulted in savage political pain for anyone involved in it.  They have to know, further, that as a Democratic administration that was just elected in a campaign based on populist rhetoric, this move will provoke not just outrage but widespread disillusionment from their base.

And then there’s the Republicans.  Apparently the White House believes that three years of the same failed negotiating strategy just weren’t quite enough, and if they just give the Republicans a little more, they’ll stop being a bunch of barbarians.

Well, it’s all falling down around their ears.  The base is furious, the Republicans are shooting down the budget with smirking casualness, and conservative candidates are, in a bit of vicious irony, getting ready to run in 2014 on the claim that Social Security must be saved from the Democrats.  Congressmen in the President’s party will be running for the hills within days, and the White House will be all alone, still plaintively explaining to an empty room just how reasonable they’ve been about everything.

What a pack of fumbling fools.

Gun control people are definitely exploiting Sandy Hook for political gain. 

Duh, idiots.  That’s how you win at this game.  The NRA knows that better than most.

…translates roughly to “Mitt Romney was too much of a plutocrat to be good at the kind of manipulative bullshit populism that Republicans have been selling for decades, so next time we need to nominate somebody with more folksy appeal.  Like me!”

Seriously, that’s all it is.  The Republican rebranding is just a return to the old bait-and-switch populism they’ve perfected: God, guns and gays at election time, free money for the rich the rest of the time.  It won’t work, because that strategy is based largely around demonizing all the groups who are currently flexing their electoral muscles, but they’ll try, because it’s got them trapped.  Forty years of this crap and it’s all they know how to do anymore.

So expect more of this from the ‘mavericks’ in the party like Christie and Jindal.  It’s an autocorrection after the ruinous Romney candidacy.  The plutocrats got tired of pretending to care about the hick vote and decided to run one of their own guys at the voters with no window dressing.

Oops.