the most important election of your lifetime: 2012 american general election thread

or that there are other lifestyles, or that some are probably better in many ways than others

like the better ones aren't differentiated by whether you're married to a woman or a dude, they're different based on whether you remember to take care of your physical and mental health and not eat so much red meat

brb moving to canada

enjoy your poutine at Couche-Tard

they don't sell that there :(

I can't find video, but CNN ran this ad twice the past hour:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57474573/republican-party-ad-takes-softer-approach-on-obama/

"He tried. You tried. It's OK to make a change."

It looks like half the party wants Romney to go crazy, half wants him to stick to the economy, and the RNC is testing this out. Count me among those who think he's much, much smarter to stick to the economy and stay clear of all the sludge. The other half has been dying for four-plus years to spew out everything, though, so--combined with Romney's anger over the Bain/tax-return campaign--it'll take discipline to resist.

Carefully phrased:

Pawlenty On Dullness Charge: ‘I’ll Show You My Tats’

Also, bowing to the inevitable:

http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/mitt-bane.jpg

kinda think all the talk about Pawlenty is some ILX conspiracy to make the GOP ticket Mitt'n'Paws

Rhetoric and teleprompter and jokes, that kind of stuff doesn’t put gas in our cars, it doesn’t pay our mortgage and it doesn’t pay our health insurance premiums.

"You know what does? MY TATS

Atrios ‏@Atrios
RT @JamesUrbaniak: Romney campaign to announce new strategy of posting satirical Obama photoshops on FreeRepublic.

way, way xpost, epic xpost, re: contenderizer...

"true or not, this is just fucking stupid. obama could easily have stuck with the inspirational suggestion that we all, in various ways, collectively work together to make our individual successes possible, and that our government is a part of this. the president could have limited himself to a "we" that includes even his own administration. but instead, at least for a moment, he went out of his way make the shitty, divisive, needle-sticking point that "you", the business owners of america, you owe your success to big government. it's no surprise that people reacted badly, even if his overall message was laudable."

"People" didn't react badly; instead a totally predictable partisan word shuffle took place. And these guys are justifiably confident that the ideology of solo success is an automatic winner, so it's important for them to jump on any pushback to this lucrative fairy tale.

Contenderizer, it's symptomatic that you would simultaneously be so righteous elsewhere about the rightness of liberal aims and so doubtful about the wisdom of a politician actually explicating them publicly. Your big strategy for Obama is that he should respond to this ridiculous line of rhetoric with a Hallmark greeting card:

"obama could easily have stuck with the inspirational suggestion that we all, in various ways, collectively work together to make our individual successes possible, and that our government is a part of this. the president could have limited himself to a "we" that includes even his own administration. but instead, at least for a moment, he went out of his way make the shitty, divisive, needle-sticking point that "you", the business owners of america, you owe your success to big government."

No. A response to decades of nonsensical "free market" "government is the problem, not the solution" bullshit is absolutely essential, as James Galbraith pointed out in The Predator State. A response to the nonsensical idea that businessmen owe nobody nothing is essential. A response to the idea that government is just a drag on everything, rather than a potentially creative player in new enterprise, is essential. A response to the idea that government couldn't possibly embody the will of the people is essential. And yeah, Obama should do it during the election. After all, he got elected in the first place by promising more than he was planning on delivering, and I think he should continue this rhetorical project even though I have no hopes of him actually delivering on any of his rhetoric. It's still good for him to challenge the rhetoric around the function of government in America. It creates expectations that he himself will not bother to try to fulfill - but that other will.

The idea that election years should be thought-free zones is, in short, great for fucked-up pundits and lovable horserace addicts, but it is lousy for the actual functioning of our democracy. Reactionaries never lose, ever, if challenging ideas become forbidden topics: you might as well let David Brooks run things at that point. To let the free market nonsense, the nonsense of businessmen thwarted in their visionary quests by the mediocre herd and the evil bureaucrats, nonsense that has become dogma over the last 20-30 years - to let this nonsense stand rhetorically unchallenged is pretty much to doom whatever projects one would have for using government to make anything - anything at all - better.

(pardon my redundant quotations in my post, plus of course I should have said "but that others will." I'll get this whole internet posting thing down before I die, I swear.)

My computer hates the length of this thread by the way. But it's a shitty computer.

hey, many xposts but thanks for spoilering Political Animals da croupier... thanks a whole fucking bunch.

i think that's fair and sensible in a lot of ways, vic. i absolutely agree, as you put it, that "a response to decades of nonsensical 'free market' 'government is the problem, not the solution' bullshit is absolutely essential."

i'm hyper-aware, however, of the political short game, of moment-to-moment positioning. with that in mind, there are good and bad ways to make good points, and this strikes me as a potential misstep. now, maybe i'm wrong. maybe "you didn’t build that" will resonate more with those who agree (whether they consider themselves in or outside that "you") than alienate those who don't. either way, i think there are much better, much less pointlessly divisive ways to make the same argument.

then again, maybe what the democratic party needs is a nice, stiff shot of "fuck you" divisiveness. in general, i'd love to see a more obstreperously liberal left.

so, uh, are you a wayback poster under a new name, or what? i don't recognize this conversation...

being 'hyper aware' of the 'moment-to-moment positioning' isn't something to brag about because the moment-to-moment positioning in an american campaign for presidency is completely inconsequential

do you know how many people in america know about the 'you didn't build that' comment? like 10%. do you know how many of them are undecided voters in a swing state? like .0001%. who cares.

Contenderizer: The posts to which I referred were from earlier today. Which does seem like a long time ago.

i get that fewer people actually pay attention to this stuff than the political blogosphere (bleeeeegh) would have you believe, but an accumulation of stuff like that actually matters. i mean, out of all the people you know (not just the people you have a beer with now but people you went to high school with and everything), how many actually know anything about politics or follow it more than once every years? very few, at least for me. but somehow, half of the population votes without actually knowing anything about what they're doing, basing their votes off of what their family says, what their friends say, and the vague reaction to stupid quotes and soundbytes that they hear repeated every once in a while from jay leno or jon steward or the CC subtitles to a CNN broadcast in an airport.

representative democracy!

*faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaart

iatee, don't you think the Romney campaign is going to try very hard to make sure that everyone knows what Obama (didn't) say about businessmen? I think the percentages you name are going to increase.

the only people who would be 'genuinely outraged' by this are already listening to rush limbaugh. nobody will be talking about this next week.

being 'hyper aware' of the 'moment-to-moment positioning' isn't something to brag about because the moment-to-moment positioning in an american campaign for presidency is completely inconsequential

― iatee, Wednesday, July 18, 2012 5:29 PM (13 minutes ago)

oh yeah, i know. that post originally had a cute little aside about how this was, perhaps, a "poisonous" awareness. then i changed it to a "crippling" awarneness, cuz i didn't really know what i meant by the poisonous bit, before striking it entirely due to parenthetical fatigue. but yeah.

At Counterpunch, carefully considering how to vote re lesser evillism:

To be sure, third parties are marginal in the United States, and there is no reason to think this will change any time soon. But even if party building outside the bounds of the duopoly system is not on the agenda, it is still worth keeping existing third party ventures alive; especially inasmuch as Democrats and Republicans have seen to it that ballot access is difficult for anyone but themselves to obtain.

Circumstances change, sometimes abruptly and in ways no one can foresee. If and when an opportunity arises to seize the time, it is well to be prepared....

Lets concede, though, for the time being, that in the coming election, the better (less evil) of the two major party candidates should get our vote. Even so, the lesser evil case for Obama is still problematic. He may not be the lesser evil.

Needless to say, were we to compare the Obama of eight or even four
years ago, with Mitt Romney now, or even with Romney before 2007, when he was governor of Massachusetts, there would be no contest. There is ample evidence that Obama knows better than he does; that he sees, or once saw, the world aright and that his instincts are, or were, decent.

What happened? To answer that question, it is worth reflecting on how he got to where he now is....

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/18/better-than-lesser-evilism-version-2012/

(I don't agree with all of that btw)

Contenderizer: The posts to which I referred were from earlier today. Which does seem like a long time ago.

― Vic Perry, Wednesday, July 18, 2012 5:36 PM (10 minutes ago)

lol, i got that part. i meant that i don't recognize your posting style, and wondered if you'd previous been posting under another name.

-ly

circumstances change? it is well to be prepared? for what, a revolution? then parties wouldn't matter. 40% of americans suddenly turning into hardcore socialists cause of something in the water?

Nope, I'm new. I read a bunch of Phil Dellio's online criticism and found out about this site through reading it.

I like it here. There's shade, and ice drinks, and nobody is toxic stupid.

the unforeseeable, cyniatee

one day you will join tru cynics.

understanding that our democratic institutions 'basically work' makes the world a much more fucked up place. there's nobody to blame except everybody and there's no magic new name for a group of people that's gonna fix anything.

"Nu-Dogs"?

(I don't agree with all of that btw)

― Pangborn to be Wilde (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, July 18, 2012 8:47 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

of course not ...

<3 iatee
<3 morbz

hmm for some reason I had thought Vic was an old poster from the Fake Matador Bulletin Board

is this really true? in the teens and 20s, the big radio and newspaper chains were owned by just a few ultra wealthy men, right?

According to this small family-owned dailies dominated the newspaper industry until the 50's.

http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHprint/v024n1/p0022-p0026.pdf

cool, thanks for the response, AB. i wasn't sure, and that's why i was asking (while also opining (ignorantly, it seems)).

i have the unsourced idea that media empires of the sort headed by william randolph hearst and david sarnoff dominated the news industry in the early 20th century and were, as a result, able to control or at least to manage public opinion. whether or not this is true, i accept that these early pioneers weren't big players by today's standards.

Wasn't Cronkite by the late '60s extremely influential (if not actually powerful)--LBJ's "If I've lost Cronkite..." and all that?

hmm for some reason I had thought Vic was an old poster from the Fake Matador Bulletin Board

it's irresponsible to post things like this, I just spent ten minutes looking up the "fake matador bulletin board" to find out how I resemble it and got nothing. I am grievously wronged.

I wonder sometimes if you are the victim of a malicious rumour

(bursts into tears)

It's more likely a malicious boomer.

Wasn't Cronkite by the late '60s extremely influential (if not actually powerful)--LBJ's "If I've lost Cronkite..." and all that?

― clemenza,

a myth just deflated in the Brinkley bio

but he was a big New Deal lib, yes

I haven't read the book--can't see that I will, either--but according to this, it was the New Yorker reviewer who deflated the myth, not Brinkley.

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/cronkites-vietnam-blunder-7185

I call bullshit, Vic Perry is a sock created to engage contenderizer in conversation.

who needed a sock for that? contenderizer was doing a serviceable job on his own

damn straight

vic perry try bookmarks