Understand the entire 2012 GOP in one Hill article

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 4 Comments

Jon Huntsman lost momentum after the Republican base realized that was just his last name.

Combat! blog endorsee and suicidally reasonable Republican Jon Huntsman has ended his campaign for the presidency, shocking no one. Okay, maybe he shocked the editorial board of the The State, the South Carolina newspaper that just endorsed him for the nomination. Everyone else was cool. Rick Perry is statistically more likely to find himself alone with Santorum and Paul, and the rapidity with which the whole field can order Chinese food will be compromised. Otherwise, it’s like hearing Foghat broke up. Huntsman wasn’t exactly a force. As the Hill puts it:

Although he came into the race with a fair amount of hype, his campaign failed to gain traction from the start. He struggled to gain momentum in the polls and fundraising. And he failed to shake off his association with the White House, given that he served as Obama’s ambassador to China.

Only in the Republican Party of 2012 would an association with the White House be considered an obstacle to the presidency. In fact, that Hill article might be a microcosm of the whole race.

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Romney Fever: Contract it!

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates, Uncategorized 6 Comments

The most interesting picture of Mitt Romney I could find

I don’t know what happened, but Rick Santorum has somehow lost the New Hampshire primary. Given his landslide tie for victory in Iowa, I am forced to conclude that some sort of irregularity or even a natural disaster prevented people in New Hampshire from voting. Perhaps it relates to these reports I’ve been getting out of New England. It seems people out there have been succumbing to a kind of mass hysteria—Romneymania, they call it—in which registered Republicans suffer a Romnomaniacal episode and, you know, give up.

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Romney takes it, Santorum surging from behind

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 5 Comments

Mitt Romney, who does not believe in evolutionary genetics

The face of his sons says it all: Mitt Romney technically won the Iowa caucuses. He got it by eight votes. It was a victory clutched in the snatch of defeat, since the real winner—the guy who worked his black slacks off to accomplish what Romney did casually—was Rick Santorum. Now it’s his turn to be the GOP front-runner who runs second to Mitt Romney. Michele Bachmann has dropped out. Newt Gingrich was eaten by a big, poop-eating snake that thought he was a poop. And Ron Paul believes that you can’t have a caucus, because they’re unconstitutional. He came in third to Santorum, proving that you can always sell nihilism to the Republican Party.

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Newsmax on why we need an independent press

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 5 Comments

"All right, but if I'm gonna put my name on this thing, I want it to be (expletive) classy."

Good news, you guys: “Newsmax Media and ION Television are moving forward with The Newsmax ION Television 2012 Presidential Debate moderated by Donald Trump, a great American success story.” Can you spot the deviation from traditional journalistic ethics in that sentence? It comes from Newsmax, the conservative sort-of-news website sponsoring that debate. You may remember the Trump/Newsmax debate from this extremely fun series of events, or perhaps this one. You may remember Newsmax from the most pernicious lie of the last few years, which also happens to include a lot of Donald Trump. But you don’t need to remember any of that stuff to understand the importance of The Newsmax ION Television 2012 Presidential Debate, because Newsmax has helpfully reminded us. “The debate has gained huge support from the country’s largest and most powerful conservative groups and voices,” Newsmax Wires writes, “but several candidates have declined to join the debate, including Mitt Romney, whose poll numbers have been sliding since his refusal of Trump’s invitation.” Now that is some maximum fucking news, right there.

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Regarding shame

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 11 Comments

As a lazy, dishonest person, I appreciate the value of shame. Take this blog: were it not for the literally several of you who expect a post each weekday, I would probably wake up early and excuse myself from writing almost every morning. Fortunately, I find time in the day to do that anyway, but my point is that shame is a powerful motivator—for me, at least, and I suspect for a lot of other people, too. One of the aspects of conservative orthodoxy I actually agree with is that our contemporary culture exerts dangerously low amounts of shame. I totally disagree with conservatives about where that shame should be placed; we still exert way too much shame on gay people and immigrants, for example. That’s valuable shame that could be more effectively directed elsewhere. Maybe, as Thomas Edsall suggests in the Times, we could redirect our shame at people who make obviously false and/or misleading statements to the general public. Earlier generations called such statements lies.

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