He literally just started talking about booting the liberals in Washington because of increased spending among other myriad things. Someone might want to let him know that his party has run Washington for the last 8 years.

This is the kind of thing that makes it illogical to consider a Republican ticket this year. This sort of straight up BS doesn’t help anyone. They’ve done this all this yammering about being for small government, low taxes, rewarding innovation, but they turn around and spend all of their time increasing the size of government, filling it with incompetents, while rewarding entrenched corporations making it harder for small companies to grow and compete. It would be one thing if they were neutral and just let the market work. So even if you like what McCain says in his speeches, you have no guarantee that he will do what he says. He’s done enough 180s this campaign cycle alone, and the Bush years were basically 7+ years of say one thing, do another.

Mitt’s speech is just a reminder of that reality. I’ll post the video when it’s online.

First, Giuliani:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B.

Read away. Both are quick reads and informative in their own way. While Peggy Noonan struggles with the concept of reasonableness, I’ll set the bar at basic honesty. None of these Republicans can even meet that.

Then, we have the ridiculousness that’s the Romney campaign, best summarized by this quote:

But I do not think I have ever seen a candidate who has moved so far, so quickly, so shamelessly and so cynically across the political spectrum as Mitt Romney. I say “cynically” because that’s what it is; it should be painfully obvious to anyone with clear political vision that Romney’s political conversion was borne out of nothing so much as pure calculation. He thought he could win as a conservative, so he became one. If he thought he could win as a pirate, he would have become a pirate.

Sure, that last sentence is the funniest and most accurate description of the Mitt Romney, the candidate. But, the best observation in that post has to be the final line:

But if Mitt Romney does wind up as the GOP candidate, it will be an immensely revealing election for those who had the gall to deride John Kerry as a flip-flopper.

Well, duh… but you’ll NEVER see that on the evening news or the Sunday talk shows or the political press. After all, IOKIYAR. After all, it’s not just Romney. McCain and Giuliani have some pretty egregious flips, too.

(the quote found via Atrios)

Definitely glad I watched that. I now know that I should really be looking at Willard in 2008.

(via Balloon Juice)

That wasn’t that bad. (via Time’s Swampland Blog, via Atrios)

TPMtv with a great breakdown of a common campaign tactic, where a sound bite gets taken out of context and turned into a controversy even though the facts support the sound bite. This instance is a Romney attack on Obama. The example itself is interesting beyond just being an example.

Josh Marshall sums it up best:

It’s sort of obvious now that he said it. But I had not quite thought of it that way. The same people now continually raising the stakes on the price of redeployment from Iraq with increasingly lurid tales of genocide, ethnic cleansing and regional implosion are pretty much exactly the same people who gamed us into this mess in the first place with another bunch of fairy tales.

And WTF is up with Romney? Is this the best Mitt can do:

Please, will a serious Republican step up aside from Ron Paul?

Check out the latest weirdness from the Romney camp. We really don’t need more lawbreakers in the White House. This is the second or third Romney staffer with criminal legal issues.

(via Atrios)

People are railing on these stories individually, but together they’re even worse. On one hand, we have the Politico, a political web site founded by former Washington Post editors, reporting that Romney had a $300 makeup bill. Who the hell cares?! They go on TV. They’re going to spend before major appearances. Even if they spend a lot on how they look, it’s NOT IMPORTANT!

Glenn Greenwald has a good rundown and makes two excellent points. First:

One of the reasons why vapid petty-personality “journalism” of this sort has so disadvantaged liberals and so advantaged right-wing fanatics is because the latter are not only willing, but droolingly eager, to exploit these sorts of themes, while liberals in general are highly reluctant, almost embarrassed, to do so. Thus, even after months of John Edwards being mauled in every media venue as a result of the Pulitzer-worthy haircut “scoop” by The Politico’s Ben Smith, these are representative reactions by liberals to the Romney “story”:

Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly:

MAKE IT STOP….From the front page of The Politico on Monday: . . . Seriously. Can we just stop this stuff? Does anyone really think that the problem with presidential campaign coverage is that it isn’t vapid and half-witted enough already? Jeebus.

Melissa McEwan, Shakespeare’s Sister:

OMG — Who GIVES a Shit?!

I swear to the fates, if there’s ever a museum of internet journalism, celebrating the best the web has to offer, The Politico would best be represented by a turd in the unfinished basement bathroom.

The only remotely non-critical reference I can find to the Romney story is this seven-word statement from Oliver Willis, which seems more satirical than anything else.

Absolutely right. I’m not playing for a team, I’m just upset that this stuff is on the news at all.

Greenwald’s also points out that as of right now, because of the relentless media pursuit of the Edwards’s haircut story, more people know about Edwards’s haircut story than knew that Saddam was not connected to 9/11 at the start of the war. Think about that. It almost makes me cry, I’m so angry at that. Read the rest of his post, it’s worth it.

The other story I’d like to put along side this is the continuing inability of our press, including the wire services (AP, Reuters), to use the word filibuster in their reporting of the Republicans’ tactics in the Senate. It’s ridiculous. This lack of information will have more impact in the 2008 elections than anything else because you can bet on the fact that Republicans will call the Democrats as do-nothings. Already, you can see the story line shaping up in articles like this one from the Economist. They go through the entire article without mentioning the procedural delays being introduced by Republicans for every bill.

As Trent Lott said, The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail … and so far it’s working for us.” It’s not working for the American people, though, who continue to suffer with a Congress that won’t pass anything because Republicans are obstructionist losers. And the strategy will work as long as it doesn’t get reported.

Put those two stories together and you see what our political media has become, a farce, a useless appendage instead of a meaningful fourth estate.

Hilzoy has an excerpt of Paul Krugman’s latest column and it’s a can’t miss. The crux of the column is that debate reporting is still terrible, pointing to a statement by professional panderer Mitt Romney who made a preposterous statement:

Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.

He’s right. A gaffe of that magnitude should be grounds for ridicule and instant disqualification from running for President. It’s basic history and if a candidate can’t understand the basic timeline of the war, they shouldn’t be running. Period.

Krugman’s ultimate point, which Atrios has built an entire blog around, is that the media is still reporting on stupid surface stories rather than actual substantive issues. They should be criticizing both Republicans and Democrats when they make collosal errors like this. Instead, they revel in pointing out the trivial and the theatrical. Demand better.

Odd thought: every criticism about waffling, making stuff up, and shifting with the winds when it’s politically convenient that one has ever heard about Clinton, Gore, or Kerry is absolutely true about McCain, Romney, and Rudy. Seriously, do these guys actually believe anything aside from their own infallibility? McCain has flipped on so many issues it’s hard to keep track. Romney has made up some incredible silliness in the last few months (this latest thing is just the most obvious). Giuliani is probably the straightest shooter of them all, but talk about shady business dealings… anyone want to ask him about Bernard Kerik on the campaign trail? Or speculate how that reflects on his judgment?

Anyway, I doubt you’ll hear anyone aside from Jon Stewart ask any of these candidates the hard questions. The media seems uninterested unless a haircut is involved.

I think Mitt Romney has pretty much fallen into the “please, not him” pile for Republican candidates, along with John McCain. This is from an article yesterday in the WaPo:

“There is no work more important to America’s future than the work that is done within the four walls of the American home,” Romney said. He also criticized people who choose not to get married because they enjoy the single life.

“It seems that Europe leads Americans in this way of thinking,” Romney told the crowd of more than 5,000. “In France, for instance, I’m told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past.”

That was news to me along with, it seems, half of the liberal blogosphere. I can’t find a reference after a good bunch of googling. None of the comment threads I scanned quickly at Atrios or Daily Kos has a citation or even a hint of a source for such a claim.

I have no idea where he got this from, and I have found no indication that this is even remotely true in any sense of the word. I’ve tried other European countries, tried different contract lengths, tried a number of different keywords.

If Romney is just making stuff up, even by accident… Sorry, but we just lived through 6 years of that. I don’t think the nation can handle 4 more.

(found on Atrios and Daily Kos)