The Bubble Genius Bob & Chez Show 8/9/12

Posted on August 10, 2012 at 10:00 pm by Bob Cesca

Back from Vacation; Mitch Hedberg; The Romney Lie Machine; Ohio Early Voting Law; Welfare Reform; The Nexus of Bain Capital, Cancer and Romneycare; Bob on the Geraldo Rivera Radio Show; Super PACs and Corporate Money; Newt Gingrich Goes Full McCarthy for the VP Nomination; American Political Tribalism; The Conservative Inability to Compromise; and much more. Brought to you by Bubble Genius!

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  • muselet

    Harry Reid is a far tougher political fighter than people give him credit for; people always underestimate the soft-spoken ones. Ask Sharron Angle.

    What Reid is doing should be considered utterly OTT—enough so to get him banned from polite society—but the Republicans have, over the years, defined decency downward to the point that it’s merely distasteful. For the Rs to complain is laughable.

    Mitt Romney saying someone else is “shamelessly lying” may be the funniest thing I’ve heard today. (It’s Always Projection.)

    Nobody likes Mitt Romney. Precious few people will vote for Mitt Romney. His entire candidacy is predicated on the notion that more people will vote against Barack Obama than will vote for Barack Obama. The Romney campaign’s throw-everything-at-the-wall strategy is meant to convince just a few more undecideds to vote against Obama, not to convince anyone to vote for Mitt Romney. It is a campaign strategy based on rank cynicism, and heaven help us if it works.

    Andrea Saul’s moment of inadvertent candor will not, contrary to the ever-ridiculous Erick ibn Erick, cost Romney the election. This is partly because the base will rationalize that as governor, Romney must have had a very fine, free-market solution to the problem of health insurance (or they won’t care because *grrrr* Obama socialist Kenyan Nazi Marxist *grrrr*), but mostly because normal human beings aren’t paying a blind bit of attention to politics right now. (Yes, I just called you and me and everyone else reading your blog abnormal—wanna make something of it?)

    Newt Gingrich tipping his (size 12) hat to Joseph McCarthy isn’t surprising at all, but Ann Coulter got there first—hell, the woman spent an entire book-like artifact humping McCarthy’s moldering corpse (you should pardon the imagery). Gingrich can’t be original even when defending the indefensible, what a surprise.

    Chez, you’re right about the difference between hard-Right conservatives and decent people with regard to collateral damage.

    Newt Gingrich actually gave a name to Michele Bachmann and the other nitwits who signed her OMG MUSLIMS! letter: The National Security Five. I wish I were joking.

    Bob, you’re right: Al Gore absolutely would have been impeached if he’d been president in September 2001.

    Welcome back, Bob. You may feel rusty, but your outrage is still there, bright as polished steel (just beware of burnout).

    –alopecia

    EDITED because I misspelled Sharron Angle’s name (there are two rs, not one, in her name).

    • KanaW

      ” the woman spent an entire book-like artifact humping McCarthy’s moldering corpse”

      Sodding hell, that’s twice today I’ve needed brain bleach from reading this site *g*

      • muselet

        Only twice? We’re slipping. :^)

        (Incidentally, I’ve found that in the long run it’s cheaper to buy brain bleach in 55-gallon drums.)

        –alopecia

    • Victor_the_Crab

      Nobody likes Mitt Romney. Precious few people will vote for Mitt Romney. His entire candidacy is predicated on the notion that more people will vote against Barack Obama than will vote for Barack Obama. The Romney campaign’s throw-everything-at-the-wall strategy is meant to convince just a few more undecideds to vote against Obama, not to convince anyone to vote for Mitt Romney. It is a campaign strategy based on rank cynicism, and heaven help us if it works.

      Amen to that. This is one of the big reasons why Mitt Romney WON’T win the presidency. It’s one thing to give the crazy base exactly what they want to hear. But you can not expect, at all, the undecided to go along with it too. Romney gives all kinds of reasons why Barak Obama shouldn’t be re-elected, but hasn’t given anyone one good reason why he himself should be president.

    • http://www.politicalruminations.com/ nicole

      I personally don’t get all the Dem outrage about Reid. I like what Doug J. (Balloon Juice) said about it:

      “When Democrats were the dominant party, they ran ads accusing their opponents of causing nuclear war and they scared up votes from dead people in Illinois. They also defeated Hitler and the Great Depression, passed Civil Rights, and presided over the greatest economic expansion in human history. Let’s be that party again. Because I’m tired of the one that frets about being fair to its opponents while it watches the nation burn.”

      Adding…….I think that Harry does have the goods, and would lay odds that Deep Bain is Jon Huntsman. :)

  • Victor_the_Crab

    Welcome back, Bob & Chez. You two were missed.

  • http://www.politicalruminations.com/ nicole

    Comparing the Romney lies to what Reid said is just wrong.

    Reid did not lie that we know of. He simply articulated a RUMOR. A rumor is not a lie, in and of itself.

    Politifact (who rated Reid’s claim as “pants on fire”) should be henceforth known as PolitiStupid (coined by Rachel Maddow).

    • mrbrink

      They’re up in arms over an ad that depicts the ugly side of cause & effect when corporate raiders like Bain Capital are on the get rich quick war path.

      And apparently you can’t say the Ryan/ Republican plan for Medicare would render Medicare unrecognizable by virtue of being replaced with a coupon system and while our families are sent out into the fine print scammer wilderness of an unregulated market because Goddamn Politifact has already declared that claim to be The Lie Of The Year!

      Priebus says:

      “Medicare is going broke,” Priebus remarked. “This president stole — he didn’t cut Medicare — he stole $700 billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare.”

      “If any person in this entire debate has blood on their hands in regard to Medicare, it’s Barack Obama,” he continued. “He’s the one that’s destroying Medicare.”

      Politifact’s support should be forthcoming.

      And Chez touched on post-9/11 nationalism. Bush’s approval in the aftermath was something like 90%, wasn’t it? but wingnuts insist we were rooting for him to fail all along, and therefore it’s only turnabout now with “your guy.”

      Well fuck that, very much. I never, at no point in my life supported the presidency of George W. Bush. Not after 9/11, not before, and certainly not now with history’s winds at my back. But a lot of people I know did. Republicans had a chance to do the right thing and they freaked the fuck out, panicked in a crisis, alienated the rest of us by hunkering down in bunker-mode as they ordered up all the blood and debt which was allowed to pile up while continuing to give out tax cuts to millionaires and lectures on new norms of torture and wealth inequality.

      Hunter S. Thompson wrote: “This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”

      This has been proven over and over, especially with the reelection of the Bush Legacy in 04′ and now with Romney beating down the doors of humanity. We have come face to face with ourselves and we’re still in denial.

      It was the liberals and Democrats who helped rally around Reagan and inflate his popularity and electoral legend in the same way they tried to rally around Bush. We’re the ones supplying all the nationalism that props up the used car salesmen of the GOP. We are the reason there has ever been any semblance of nationalism because we give in to our better collective nature and the fuckers prey upon it and take advantage of it, and even use it against us. Mocking us with our own natural tendency toward brotherhood.

      Conservatives should be asking themselves why they keep fucking over half the country who only want to get along for the greater good?

      • http://www.politicalruminations.com/ nicole

        i am sad to say that I supported Bush for a period of time after 9/11. In fact, I didn’t stop until a couple of years later.

        I should have known better.