By Emily Theroux

Barack Obama

The night America celebrated the election of the first African-American president in history, no one really imagined what Barack Obama’s opponents – the ones who took his victory as an affront to truth, justice, and the American way – were capable of.

For many Republicans, the sting of defeat and the political imperative of surrendering the executive branch to another “Democrat” administration were reason enough to begin scheming in earnest to regain power. For others, however, the collective recoil of the right from Obama’s election signified something more visceral. The mere fact of the new president’s race was an affront that people inclined to mistrust or malign minorities couldn’t abide.

Obama the first black president would soon live with the first black family in “the people’s house” – the American version of a palace, whose occupants had always resembled the now-ebbing white majority. The ugly legacy of racial animus bubbled up from hibernation, to remain just beneath the surface of the national dialogue.

By 2010, it had coalesced into an obsessive goal – not for all conservatives, certainly, but for the white supremacists in their midst. Of utmost importance to both the biased politicians who wouldn’t come right out and say it and the very vocal portion of the populace who would: getting the black guy out of the White House (only the racist signs and posters and websites didn’t couch that sentiment in such bland terms, with all the banality of evil even the milder words convey).

Reince Priebus

As Reince Priebus, chairman of the RNC, demagogued the issue’s urgency the other day in apparent racial code that would have done Scarlett O’Hara proud: “We have to put an end to this Barack Obama presidency before it puts an end to ‘our way of life’.” (That expression, once widely employed in the antebellum South, is a paradigm of dog-whistle politics: It’s too high-pitched for human ears, but them good-ole-boy redbone coonhounds can hear it a mile away.)

Beck calls Obama a racist, and the floodgates open

Glenn Beck, the zookeeper at Wingnut World, played the “reverse racism” card against Obama early on, inexplicably calling a biracial man raised by his white mother and grandparents “a racist” with “a deep-seated hatred of white people and the white culture.” The right seized on it, venting their post-election fury by attacking a succession of black “proxies” for the then-Illinois senator who dared to attempt “running for president while black” – and soundly beat them.

Andrew Breitbart

First, congressmen and talk-show hosts scapegoated ACORN, sabotaging an organization devoted primarily to registering minority voters. Later, far-right bloggers targeted Van Jones, the president’s “Green Jobs” czar, and smeared Shirley Sherrod, an employee of the Department of Agriculture whose remarks about helping a white farmer were distorted by “creative” videotape editing to make her look like a racist.

The attack dogs’ fearless leader, Drudge Report protege Andrew Breitbart, purportedly “died of hostility” (as Robert Wright of The Atlantic suggested) on March 1 at the age of 43, yet was survived by a cadre of fanatic “Breitbots” dedicated to carrying out his mission here on earth.

‘White-balling’ (reverse racism) vs. the media

Currently in the Breitbart scandal machine’s sights are members of the mainstream media or progressive blogosphere who dare to venture into “white-balling” territory. (That’s what I call the mythic “blackballing of white people” that the right wing calls 21st-century “reverse racism,” otherwise defined as any utterance, however non-judgmental, that causes white people to imagine that black people could possibly blame them or their ancestors in some way for Dred Scott, “whites only” water fountains, high-rise public housing projects, stop-and-frisk, Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima, America’s 70 percent non-white prison population, voter ID, or racial slurs, about the very worst of which – according to “Chris,” author of  the incisive and funny blog, “Stuff Black People Hate” – doofy white guys named Chad in too-tight pink polo shirts will ask you why, if black people can say the most awful word in the English language, they can’t.)

Joe Williams

The story of how the Breitbart bloggers brought down Joe Williams – the first black editor to be hired by the DC print/online enterprise Politico, in the wake of its confrontation by the National Association of Black Journalists because of a noticeable dearth of diversity in its newsroom – is instructive.

Joe Williams, according to Politico’s website, is “a veteran political journalist and telegenic analyst” whose credentials include a 1996 Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and a solid 28-year career in newspaper reporting and editing, magazine writing, and newsroom management. As deputy chief of the Boston Globe’s Washington Bureau, he covered the 2008 presidential campaign and Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Politico hired him in June 2010 as deputy White House editor but, less than a year later, reassigned him to a reporter’s job – that of White House correspondent, “specializing in the intersection of race and politics,” according to Tracie Powell of the Poynter Institute.

The move (which Powell didn’t characterize as a demotion) gave Williams an opportunity to develop his broadcast skills while providing Politico with onscreen “proof ” of its diversity – yet his editor’s job went to a white female editor who still holds the position, so Politico’s management ranks are once again no more racially diverse than they were before Williams was hired.

“They said they wanted me as a reporter, which would get me closer to the action so that I could describe some of the things I would talk about on TV with more authority,” Williams told Powell. “They said I was good at it.” Williams’ supervisors also pointed him in the direction of cable news programs, many of which express a viewpoint, so Politico’s honchos can’t say they expected a correspondent stationed at the vortex of race and politics, during an election year this volatile, to appear on cable opinion shows and then clam up on the subject of race.

Romney ‘very, very comfortable’ with people like him

Joe Williams was indeed good at his job. I watched him frequently on cable news programs like Martin Bashir’s afternoon talk show on MSNBC, and Williams was thoughtful, knowledgeable about the presidential race, and insightful about the issues. Then one day in June, he appeared on Bashir’s program, gave a candid answer to a simple question, and returned to the office to find his life turned inside out.

Mitt Romney

Bashir had asked him why he thought Mitt Romney appeared so often on Fox News while avoiding network TV and other cable stations. “Romney is very, very comfortable, it seems, with people who are like him,” Williams replied. “That’s one of the reasons why he seems so stiff and awkward in town hall settings, why he can’t relate to people other than that. But when he comes on ‘Fox and Friends,’ they’re like him. They’re white folks who are very much relaxed in their own company.”

When Williams mentioned people who aren’t like Romney, he was referring to class differences (between Romney and white, conservative town hall attendees, or waitresses at a diner he visited, or the “hoi-polloi” in plastic rain ponchos at a NASCAR event), not racial differences. But by that time, it didn’t make any difference. Sharp ears at The Washington Free Beacon and Breitbart.com pricked up when Joe Williams said “white folks,” and that seemingly innocuous expression was all they needed to hear. The “Reverse Racism Police” were off in their squad cars, sirens blaring, to bag another hapless suspect.

The bloggers blogged their inevitable tale of Joe Williams’ racist smear against Mitt Romney and perfidy against Politico, throwing in a few “raunchy” tweets they came across while trawling through the reporter’s virtual baggage. They dug up dirt about his personal life. And sure enough, they scored a bulls-eye: before the week was out, Politico had suspended its most conspicuous “diversity” hire.

Except for the fact that Joe Williams is not an employment statistic, a demographic profile, a notch in someone’s belt, or an object lesson in the pitfalls of political coverage. He’s a human being, not a scalp taken by vicious partisans with an ideology to flog.

Next week: Part II, “Reverse Racism and False Equivalency”

Mitt Romney ... blowing in the wind

By Emily Theroux

When it rains on the Republicans’ Fourth of July parade, it’s a monsoon!

I doubt seriously that the stars will ever again align against the GOP in the precise configuration they’ve achieved since the Supreme Court ruled that the individual health care mandate in the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. The deluge of dashed hopes, mixed messages, and wrong turns that has flooded the vast conservative echo chamber has expanded the right wing’s Independence Day celebration into a “terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week,” to borrow a phrase from author Judith Viorst (and a meme from the Internet).

Never mind that “the mandate” was an idea that Republicans originally proposed but which they detest now against all reason and with vehement intensity. (President Obama is equally intent on furthering his inevitable goal of “bipartisan compromise,” which never gets him anywhere with these people.) Once Obama looks favorably upon such brainstorms of the right-wing think tanks and thereby gives them cooties, conservatives metamorphose into their own doctrines’ most fervent critics.

How many things went wrong for the Republicans in the short span of a week? I counted a dirty dozen:

1. The Supremes ruled against them, and “heads exploded,” as Dick Cheney once said, all over Washington.

2. Fox and CNN (trying to outfox Fox) both got the story horribly wrong at first, because whoever skimmed that ruling was either in too big a hurry for a scoop to read past the first paragraph or too “simple” to fathom what the ruling meant. They saw “individual mandate unconstitutional” and ran with it. (Even worse, Obama was tuned in to both channels and, at first, believed what he was hearing!)

3. The entire wingnut populace spent days massively freaking out, denouncing the treachery of Chief Justice John Roberts (who is supposed to be “an impartial guardian of the law,” not a right-wing tool), and proclaiming that “Obamacare” included “the biggest tax increase in the history of the world.” Roberts’ new critics invaded his Wikipedia biography and symbolically “repealed” him by “replacing” the title “Chief Justice” with “Chief Traitor.”

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage all tried to outdo each other’s bombast. “Our freedom of choice just met its death panel,” Limbaugh raged about SCOTUS. Beck hawked T-shirts depicting Roberts as a coward. Savage suggested that Roberts’ epilepsy meds had caused “cognitive disassociation (sic)” that affected his judgment. And Troy Newman of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue compared the day the decision was announced to 9/11 and, appallingly, referenced Nazi Germany as well, warning that “we are all moving down the road toward complete annihilation.”

4. Some nut-job even proposed one of Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle’s “Second Amendment remedies.” In Michigan, former state GOP spokesman Matt Davis asked in a mass email whether “armed rebellion” might now be justified. An anonymous commenter responded to an online article about it: “I will not submit I will not buy something I don’t want I will not pay the fine (sic). And I will not be arrested peacefully. Your move Feds (double sic: punctuation needed desperately).”

5. Mitch McConnell appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” expecting his usual softball interview. Chris Wallace, however, grilled him relentlessly about the Republicans’ plan to “replace” Obamacare once they’ve repealed it. After Wallace asked him three times how the GOP planned to cover some 30 million uninsured Americans, McConnell finally blurted out in exasperation, “That’s not the issue!” Then, realizing what he was admitting, he clarified that the Republicans didn’t have a replacement plan for Obamacare’s most important provision.

6. After Republicans were proven wrong on how big the tax increase would be (the Great God Reagan passed a higher one), Romney’s campaign stooge, Eric Fehrnstrom the Etch a Sketch guy, made it clear that Romney didn’t consider the fine that “free riders” would have to pay for ignoring the mandate a “tax” but rather an “unconstitutional penalty.” If Romney were to call it a tax, it would mean that he had also “raised taxes” when Massachusetts passed Romneycare. Much wingnuttery ensued, including a snide tweet from Rupert Murdoch saying Mitt should “hire some real pros” for his campaign team.

On the “penalty” side of the debate were conservative think-tank analysts, The Wall Street Journal editorial board, and the four dissenting justices – all of whom warned that accepting as a tax what was written into law as a penalty would give big-government advocates “unlimited power to impose new purchase mandates.” The government could “legally tax our every breath,” Sen. Rand Paul warned.

7. Individual GOP lawmakers have a personal stake in one facet of the law they so fervently want to repeal: the provision that allows their own adult children to remain on their health insurance policies. Tea Party blowhard Joe Walsh (who also recently tried to “swiftboat” his Democratic opponent, a former Black Hawk pilot and double amputee, for “politicizing” her military service) explained that, while his 24-year-old son is covered by his mother’s plan, the freshman congressman doesn’t really support keeping the provision. “I don’t know where I am on that, and that’s a lousy thing to say,” he observed. “That doesn’t matter to me, though, irregardless (sic) of that.” (It’s “lousy” indeed, given that Walsh’s ex-wife has sued him for more than $100,000 in child support arrears that she claims he owes.)

8. Mother Jones magazine updated a story about Mitt and the Fabulous Bain Boys investing $75 million in Stericycle, a medical waste firm that disposed of aborted fetuses. This time, Mitt couldn’t weasel out of it by claiming he no longer worked there when the Stericycle deal went down. According to writer David Corn, an SEC document revealed that Mitt had held sole “voting and dispositive power” over Bain’s Stericycle shares when the investment was made. One pro-life blogger, along with Dan Primack of CNN Money, challenged Corn’s conclusion. Primack acknowledged that Bain asked Mitt to continue signing Stericycle fund documents after he “left” in February 1999 to salvage the Olympics in Utah. (Mitt had taken an earlier leave in 1994 to run for the Senate.) “Romney said he will stay on as a part-timer with Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions,” The Boston Herald stated at the time. A July 1999 press release said Romney was “currently on a part-time leave of absence” and quoted him speaking for Bain Capital.

9. In a surprise move, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed three voter suppression bills. Needless to say, Republicans weren’t too happy about this unprecedented defection from their nationwide plot to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters.

10. Jonathan Krohn, the erstwhile wunderkind of CPAC’s 2009 conference as a precocious 13-year-old, has now emerged at 17 to denounce conservatism – and his own naivete. Movement bigwigs who once revered him are now calling him vile names and sniffing that they secretly thought all along that he was annoying, condescending, and mindless.

11. On the Fourth, Mittens caved to intense pressure from his puppeteers by revising his views on the “penalty vs. tax” issue yet again, now calling it “a tax” but offering no elaboration. Then a Wall Street Journal op-ed blasted Mitt and his bumbling campaign strategy for “slowly squandering an historic opportunity” by vacillating and obfuscating on issues like health care reform. Flip-Flopper-in-Chief, anyone?

12. And for the grand finale, the right’s wackiest characters genuinely “brought the crazy” during America’s 236th birthday week. El Rushbo dropped another misogynistic bombshell when he replied to a caller opining on the youth vote: “When women got the right to vote is when it all went downhill. Because that’s when votes started being cast with emotion and maternal instinct that government ought to reflect.” (Worry not, dittoheads: Beck’s got his back. The Blaze, Beck’s website, insisted that Rush was merely baiting liberal critics with an old saw written by Ann Coulter – who probably really believes it.) Meanwhile Florida’s favorite Mad Hatter, Rep. Allen “Wild, Wild” West, said at a campaign rally: “I have a great idea. I believe, for personal security, every American should have to go out and buy a Glock 9mm” – an obvious applause line, gun humor for the ideologically challenged. “And if you don’t do it, we’ll tax you,” he added, after his curtain call. (Col. West is not amused by the federal income tax.) “Now I wonder how the liberals will feel about that one.”

I have to hand it to him: That’s one hell of an “individual mandate.” The problem is that it’s about as thoughtless a possible provocation to trigger-happy whack jobs as Dubya jeering, “Bring ’em on!” at the citizens of a nation we had just occupied in a preemptive war. Or Sarah Palin exhorting the Tea Party faithful, “Don’t retreat, RELOAD!” and using a U.S. map festooned with figurative gun sights to target the districts of congressional Democrats who had voted for the Affordable Care Act – like Arizona’s Gabby Giffords, later shot and gravely injured by a deranged gunman who killed six other people during the same attack.

I’m not implying that the shooter had ever seen Palin’s provocative map; we have no way of knowing what set off his crazed shooting spree. But all we need in this polarized country is more wildly irresponsible NRA rhetoric – or everybody and his grandma packing heat.

By Emily Theroux

Come one, come all to the three-ring circus of Willard “Mitt” Romney’s “This Week in Immigration” road show! Step right up and have the time of your life!

That cornball “Greatest Show on Earth” hype was what came to mind while I listened to the Mittster’s “traveling press secretary,” Rick Gorka, an apparently sentient young man behaving eerily like a trained parrot before an assembled media gaggle. Undaunted by the attempts of reporters to elicit a different response to their repeated questions about Mitt’s immigration agenda, Gorka managed to say absolutely nothing substantive for a full seven minutes. When asked about Mitt’s considered opinion of the recent Supreme Court ruling that rendered Arizona’s notorious “Papers, Please” Act legally impotent, his laconic, gum-chewing flack echoed the Boss Man’s desultory “states’ rights” bibble-babble, as he noted, “over and over and over again.”

Willard “Lizard Boy” Romney has apparently designated the robotic Gorka as his substitute ringmaster. This inspired hire has provided the candidate with a nifty dodge from the media circus converging on “The Magical ‘Mitt-stery’ Tour” of daring escapes from accountability, mind-boggling platitudes, and broken-record ballyhoo that the campaign has devolved into. Why the calliopes and clown brigade every time the campaign stops at a new venue? Because the GOP candidate mulishly refuses to answer a potentially lethal question: What is his policy on immigration reform?

“The governor supports the right of states,” Gorka mechanically replied. “That’s all we’re going to say on this issue.”

That and Mitt’s tedious contention that President Obama has broken his campaign promise to “address” the immigration system within the first year of his presidency and, “therefore,” hasn’t made any attempt to reform it since then. Mitt jumped to the conclusion that the states have some nebulous “Tenth Amendment right” to “craft their own immigration law” when the executive branch “fails” to act. (This view also enabled dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia to “strike down the results of the Civil War,” in the words of a clever headline writer for Alternet.)

We’ve almost arrived at the main attraction: Mitt’s audacious high-wire act in the center ring. But first, send in the clowns! I think I spy Rush “Bubbles” Limbaugh, fortunately still looming in the wings – but I have no doubt he’ll swing by soon, his imposing bulk dangling from the high bar of a very slender trapeze. And mira, amigos – here comes Jan “Rosie Sunshine” Brewer! She’s got her platinum wig all in a wad because she thinks the Supremes don’t like her finger-wagging routine any more. She’s so goofy, she still thinks her side “won” when the ruling came down!

Look over there – is that Michael “Emmett Kelly” Steele, returning for Act II of his hilarious GOP stand-up routine? I barely recognized him without the villainous moustache. What’s that he’s saying – Mitt’s going to lie low for the rest of the summer, then give us some general-election “straight talk” after Labor Day to let us know, finally, what he’s decided to say he thinks about Amercia’s “illegals” quandary? What’s that about David Koch and the Super PAC puppeteers? Very funny, Pennywise!

And there’s Hizzoner, Nino “Bozo” Scalia, riding bareback on Ann Romney’s prized dressage horse. That’s some clown get-up he’s got on there – a judge’s robe! Bozo probably should have been wearing boxing gloves, because he had a big spat with the majority, who didn’t think much of his highly politicized dissenting opinion – or his brainstorm about calling down the Insane Clown Posse on all 12 million of those “alien” interlopers, chasing them back across the border, and then letting Mexico deal with them, even though they didn’t all come from Mexico. (And you’d never know that Nino himself was the son of an immigrant, would you?) Take a bow, Nino/Bozo – or get that fancy horse to do some of those little fluttery ballet steps for you! (That equine must have been pricey. Good thing Mitt could write it off as a “business expense.”)

I realize Mitt’s really teetering up there; at least he’s risk-averse enough to always use a net. (Obama’s the real daredevil, though; no net, no sissy tights, just a big stick to help him keep his balance.) What’s really scary is what Mitt’s up against, straddling “the danged fence” the way he does. If he leans too far to the right, he’s in danger of losing even more of that baffling demographic, Latino voters (which he can’t fathom until he figures out how to tell the “legal” immigrants from the “illegal” ones). And if he swings too far to the left, he’s going to fall off the back of the “Restore Our Future” campaign bus! (Odd concept, by the way – how can you “restore” something that hasn’t happened yet? Sounds like a socialist takeover, if you ask me.)

When the Romney traveling circus comes to town, prepare yourself for the awful truth: This circus is no genuine fun at all, with the exception of a little schadenfreude. (We’re laughing at you, Mitt, not with you.) This Big Top spectacle offers its share of elephants, aerialists, and clowns, and it even has its own traveling pitchman. But it’s so repetitive that it’s guaranteed to “cure insomnia,” as Martin Bashir quipped on his MSNBC show – and it’s no place to go searching for honest solutions to the serious economic dilemma this country has been tricked into by GOP hucksters. The same scam artists who flim-flammed Americans into buying what Dubya’s Great Neocon Illusionist Exposition was selling 12 years ago hope to fool the gullible into believing that Brother Mitt’s Traveling Salvation Show offers a shiny new approach to the one that drove the wagons into the ditch in the first place.

As P.T. Barnum is falsely credited with saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” If Mitt manages to pull a fast one on the American people and sell them his own bill of goods by talking in circles for the next four months, we’ll only have the folks who aren’t paying attention to blame (like all of those registered Democrats who stayed home in droves during the primary election for a candidate to run against Tea Party freshman Nan Hayward; if you’re reading this, which would surprise me, you know who you are).

I wonder what pearls of wisdom Mitt Romney will have to offer about Scalia’s “miscarriage” of judicial propriety, by the way?

Very likely, nothing new. Move along, folks. The show is over. Nothing to see here.

In circus lingo, a “fireball outfit” is a traveling circus that earns a reputation for swindling patrons. If that’s indeed what’s been going on during this comedy of errors, the voters should demand their money back and ride the bums out of town on a rail when they show up at the next whistle stop with their hands out.

By Emily Theroux

Ever get the feeling that Mitt Romney qualifies everything he says to death?

He’s careful never to: a) utter a simple declarative sentence; b) directly answer a direct question; c) take a definitive stand on any controversial subject; d) reveal that he lacks any sincere or strongly held beliefs; or, e) reveal that, au contraire (as Missionary Mitt might have said, waiting out the Vietnam War in Gay Paree), he actually has any sincere or strongly held beliefs. If Multiple Choice Mitt, as one wag called him, continues to hide behind temporizing, query-dodging, and verbal gymnastics, pretty soon, nothing he says will make sense to anyone who still cares to listen.

The candidate’s question circumvention, it appears, may already have reached critical mass. Mitt is currently “trying to walk a line” (translation from Republican: ducking the question) by camouflaging his reaction to President Obama’s new deportation policy for undocumented immigrants.

A Bloomberg poll released three days after Obama’s announcement revealed that Americans enthusiastically support the plan by a margin of more than 2 to 1. Mitt, however, blindsided by the president’s stroke of sheer political genius, has been caught dumbstruck with his pants bunched around his ankles – a posture that could make walking and evading pundits at the same time a harrowing experience.

Bewildered by this unexpected challenge, Mitt found himself faced with another of those risky sit-down interviews with a non-Fox journalist. His interrogator, CBS veteran Bob Schieffer, asked Romney five times whether he would rescind Obama’s grant of deferred action – which is not an executive order, a form of “back-door amnesty,” or a path to permanent legal status, as some news outlets have mistakenly reported. Instead, this presidential directive (lauded by the reform advocacy group America’s Voice as “the biggest news on immigration in 25 years”) offers a reprieve from the threat of deportation to some 800,000 “DREAMers” – those undocumented immigrants age 30 or under who were brought here as children.

Mitt Romney’s ‘great allergy to specifics and details’
Facing Bob Schieffer’s simple question, Mitt meandered, stuttered, and blundered through a series of obfuscations that clearly didn’t meet Schieffer’s standards for an answer. Mitt suggested they “step back and look at the issue,” then segued into a nonsequitur about Obama’s alleged failure to do anything about immigration reform earlier in his term. (This charge, one of Mitt’s stock campaign lies, ignores the fact that Senate Republicans shot down the DREAM Act during the 2010 lame duck session of Congress by once again abusing the filibuster during a procedural vote.)

Still stalling Schieffer, Romney digressed about the military and then nonsensically claimed that any perceived need for him to reply to Schieffer’s question “would be overtaken by events, if you will, by virtue of my putting in place a long-term solution with – with legislation which creates law that relates to these individuals, such that they know what their – their status … is going to be.”

After Romney’s disastrous “Face the Nation” interview, Rich Lowry of the National Review observed that the candidate exhibits a “great allergy to specifics and details.” The reason he’s so vague, Lowry speculated, is that Romney believed he lost his 1994 Senate race against Teddy Kennedy because he was “too specific” when speaking to the press. Hence, his manic swing to the opposite pole: extreme equivocation.

Mitt thought he had plenty of time to wait for Sen. Marco Rubio to come up with a bright idea that would exculpate him from his “severely conservative” position on immigration during the primaries: that undocumented immigrants should simply “self-deport.” Mitt figured the current Congress wouldn’t pass any version of the DREAM Act, whether it bore Rubio’s imprimatur or not. If they did, he reasoned, he could simply veto it; he boasted about that frequently on the campaign trail.

Mittens hides out between a rock and a hard place
As things stand now, Mitt can choose to court Latino voters by admitting that he’ll probably leave Obama’s policy in place while searching for a “long-term solution” (a phrase he repeated five times in a press statement intended to convey that – as with every other policy position about which he’s been interviewed – he didn’t plan to reveal any details until after the election). If he concedes that he won’t rescind Obama’s directive “on Day One,” he’ll antagonize the GOP’s most xenophobic supporters.

Since Rubio confessed that his “DREAM Act Lite” proposal was dead in the water once Obama enacted virtually the same plan, Mitt’s only alternative is to keep stonewalling reporters and insisting, as he did when the GOP “war against women” became an issue, that his message for Latino voters would be focused “intently” on economic issues. If he takes that route, he may alienate Latino voters even further than he already did by pandering to anti-immigrant bigotry during the primaries.

To make matters worse, Mitt’s own caucus has leapt into the fray, with Mitch McConnell and three other senators exhorting him to man up and explain in detail, at an upcoming conference of Latino officials, what he’s planning to do about immigration. In the House, John Boehner and company have joined their radical base to denounce Obama’s plan as “executive overreach.”

Boehner shed crocodile tears for Obama’s “victims” while speculating about the constitutionality of the president’s proposal. Adding insult to stupefying hypocrisy, Boehner (who practically invented gridlock) huffed, “The president’s actions make it much more difficult for us to work in a bipartisan way to get to a permanent solution.” (You want bipartisan, Mr. “Compromise – I reject the word” Boehner? Step outside, and I’ll show you bipartisan!)

Young Latinos who lobbied for DREAM Act elated, worried
Whether Obama’s immigration plan is challenged in court or emerges as a viable policy, many young DREAMers who hope to be spared from deportation are jubilant. Others, however, remain apprehensive about declaring their identity to the government. Although the Obama administration has tried previously to deter Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from deporting so many young, productive immigrants and asked the agency to focus instead on apprehending undocumented criminals, ICE isn’t bound by law to halt deportations simply because the administration asks them to. Instead of being handled by ICE, however, this new, more affirmative process will be implemented by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles benefits, not enforcement.

If Mitt ever gets around to formulating a response to the plaintive queries of DREAMers, they may find his dissembling approach offers far too little, way too late. No one will be paying attention any longer, whether he runs his malicious ads in Spanish, Klingon, or Farsi.

The lesson Mitt may glean from this humiliating episode is written in plain English: When you stop taking questions in public life, you learn the hard way that people soon stop waiting for your answers.

By Emily Theroux

The Naderesque argument that the Democratic presidential candidate is merely “the lesser of two evils” has been making an energetic comeback on progressive blogs. Liberals have become restive about a growing list of incursions on civil liberties and human rights that President Obama once vowed to oppose or overturn.

I’m not wild about Obama’s national security policy, either. But making “protest votes” for unelectable third-party candidates is an exercise in futility. Far from merely sending a principled message to Democrats that their capitulation to GOP militarism will no longer be tolerated, this strategy may permit Republican extremists to sabotage both our economy and our social contract. If this radical contingent succeeds, middle-class Americans may worry far more about economic disaster than government surveillance, political prisoners, or terrorists overseas.

The president couldn’t possibly have lived up to the rosy expectations that voters, disgusted by the Dubya years, had of his presidency. But now, scores of disgruntled Democrats have resolved to abandon the two-party system and become registered independents. Some plan to vote for Obama only if they reside in swing states; others who live in solid blue states may write in Ron Paul (seriously!) or vote for a third-party candidate like former Utah Gov.  Rocky Anderson. Obama critics on the left claim there’s very little space between Obama and Romney, because candidates from both parties depend on corporate donors and are thus beholden to the same interests.

Rob Kall of the progressive website OpEdNews declared in a recent column that he had personally decided to leave the Democratic Party. Some 200 of the site’s 55,000 members commented, professing fervent opposition to Obama’s expansion of Bush policies, including the limited use of remote-controlled Predator drones to support battlefield operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama went on to implement drones operated by CIA officers to kill suspected terrorists (among them, American citizens) “without a shred or whit of due process,” in the view of Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald.

The CIA’s human quarry is tracked by U.S.-based “pilots” whose unmanned aircraft attack targets within the borders of sovereign nations. Drone strikes in Pakistan (which critics term “extrajudicial executions”) have been reported by observers to have killed numerous civilians near the pilots’ “marks” – indicating that these hits may not be as “surgical” as the CIA claims. The official record of “collateral damage” from May 2010 to August 2011? Militants: 600. Noncombatants: 0.

I personally deplore the barbarity of these strikes (and fear that we will eventually have to contend with terrorists acquiring this technology and once again blowing random New Yorkers to smithereens). I am also chagrined by the moral ambiguity of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which affirmed presidential authority over the indefinite military detention of prisoners without charge or trial. Other dubious offenses include the administration’s 2011 defense before the Supreme Court of GPS devices employed in warrantless surveillance; Obama’s failure to honor his inaugural promise to close Guantanamo Bay’s detention camp; his stepped-up policy of deporting undocumented immigrants at a far higher rate than Bush did; the continued use of military tribunals after vowing to try terrorism suspects in civil courts; and the ongoing militaristic fixation of our government.

Obama’s principled opposition to the Iraq War as a candidate for both the U.S. Senate and the presidency led me to foolishly imagine him as a pacifist. He did end the Iraq War, as he promised, but I don’t believe we should commit to staying in Afghanistan until 2024; no other culture, from the Mongols to the Soviets, ever succeeded in “unifying” Afghanistan’s warring tribes. Apparently we have forgotten the past and are condemned, as George Santayana observed, to repeat it.

Obama had to capitulate to certain political realities – the almost-universal opposition of both parties to allowing Guantanamo prisoners on American soil to be tried in civilian courts, as well as Obama’s apprehension about facing a military/national security “coup” if he attempted to prosecute Bush-era war crimes. With an intransigent GOP opposition obstructing his every move – and rejecting their own proposals once Obama endorsed them – the president had to drop the popular “public option” from health care, abandon comprehensive immigration reform, and limit financial regulation.

I remain a pragmatist willing to work within the current electoral system because I believe that a radical-right landslide would eclipse any Democratic failure. Once in office, Romney would repay his wealthy donors by doing the bidding of the Koch brothers, the House’s “Ayn Rand” faction, and the Christian right. He would follow the dictates of Grover Norquist on a regressive tax policy that would exacerbate income disparity. He would install Supreme Court justices who would ensure a conservative majority for a generation.

Do left-wing purists really want to see the Ryan budget passed, along with interminable “Kill at Will” gun laws, racist voting laws, and xenophobic immigration laws? Do they want to witness Roe V. Wade overturned and women subjected to personhood amendments and forced vaginal probes? A GOP Senate majority swept in on Romney’s coattails could conspire with the Republican House to turn back the clock on the rights of workers to the Industrial Age, of African-Americans to the Jim Crow era, of the unemployed to “Hoovervilles,” of the elderly to county poorhouses, and of women to medieval times.

By Emily Theroux

“There are those who tell the truth. There are those who distort the truth. And then there’s Mitt Romney.”

That was how Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson put it, as politely as he could manage in a genuine mainstream media outlet. All political campaigns exaggerate, “dissemble” (a courteous word, by all accounts), and boast, Robinson added, but voters generally tend to put up with it “as long as there’s a kernel of veracity in there somewhere. Even by this lax standard, Romney too often fails. Not to put too fine a point on it, he lies. Quite a bit. ”

As early as last December, liberal blogger Greg Sargent of The Plum Line astutely noted that, while Beltway reporters were predicting that Romney’s $10,000 bet offer to Rick Perry might warrant a national media narrative, something more disturbing about the Mittster seemed more indicative of Romney’s character: the candidate’s “serial dishonesty, his willingness to say and do anything to win.”

Liberal bloggers (and even one conservative one) began to pipe up about Romney “making things up out of thin air,” imparting “highly embellished anecdotes,” blabbing “one massive lie after another,” and finally, the straight dope: “telling bald-faced lies” that “could be easily disproven by an enterprising reporter.” Jack Jodell of The Saturday Afternoon Post said Romney “thoroughly lacks moral character and is completely unstable and untrustworthy.” But Bob Cesca of The Daily Banter blog probably summed it up best when he called Romney “the most lie-based candidate for president ever.”

“The degree to which Mr. Romney lies, all the time, about all sorts of stuff, and doesn’t seem to care when he gets caught, is maybe the single most notable thing about his campaign,” said Rachel Maddow. Blogger Steve Benen, who writes for The MaddowBlog, just published the 20th installment of his weekly tabulation of Romney’s whoppers, “Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity,” which presented a list of 18 “big lies” that Mitt had told in the previous week alone. Benen debunked every single sham, simulation, or slander as he moved down the line.

Why does Romney lie, so frequently and easily?
He lies because he has to, says J.M. Ashby of The Daily Banter blog. “Running on the record as it stands isn’t an option.”

I’m not convinced, however. I think it’s worse than that. I sometimes speculate that Romney lies because because he CAN – although my suspicion is purely conjecture. No news outlets or pundits that the moderate swing-state electorate pays attention to are making “Mythomaniac” Mitt’s deceit a central campaign theme. “When do reporters start calling Mitt Romney a liar?” asked Paul Waldman of The American Prospect. “And I use the word ‘lie’ very purposefully,” Waldman added. “There are lots of things Romney says about Obama that are distortions, just plain ridiculous, or unfalsifiable but obviously false, as when he often climbs into Obama’s head to tell you what Obama really desires …. But there are other occasions … where Romney simply lies, plainly and obviously.”

When Newt Gingrich admitted on CBS News’ Early Show in January that he was intentionally calling Romney a liar, both Norah O’Donnell and Bob Schieffer appeared to almost swoon from shock. (I consulted the thesaurus: There’s no other word or expression used to describe someone who routinely utters falsehoods that’s quite as powerful as “liar” – unless you call them a “damned liar” or employ an even more profane moderator.) The mainstream media haven’t been holding Romney to account thus far because, in part, it’s simply not something that most reporters would feel comfortable saying on the public record or on camera about a presidential candidate. If confronted, they often temporize, saying “both sides do it,” campaigns “exaggerate” or “misspeak,” candidates are “phony” or use party talking points to represent their views.

The ‘Mitt-thology’ of Mittens meets ‘Bend Sinister’
It has also occurred to me that the reason Mitt may “make stuff up” about his business career, his political record, and even inconsequential things like his given name, is because he is perhaps compelled to. Mitt Romney is not like other politicians; his lying is compulsive, constant, and extreme – and may even be pathological. The chronic nature and frequency of the behavior are hallmarks of this mental disorder, according to Dr. Charles C. Dyke, writing in Psychiatric Times. Pathological liars usually have sound judgment about other matters, although the lies themselves often appear to be rash, risky, random, illogical, purposeless, and easily discoverable.” One surefire verbal sign of atrocious lying is stammering – which The Daily Kos pointed out after Mitt “stumble-tongued his way” into the “blunderful … word salad” he uttered last week:

“Uh, I’m actually going to, I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was. And with regards to, uh, I’ll go back and take at what was said there.”

“Mitt, you dunce, you have to remember your lies,” the article’s headline blared. “For someone with his assets, you would think he would have hired himself a better coach of effective lying,” the writer mused. The first rule, he added, is, “Don’t deviate too far from the truth when lying. Because doing so will make it hard to follow the second rule, which is: Remember your lies.”

Many pathological liars are narcissists and extreme attention seekers, and some are even capable of criminal behavior, including a prominent California judge, said Dyke. “Why such a successful individual would repeatedly tell lies that could damage his credibility and put him in trouble with the law or other administrative bodies is baffling. Was his lying behavior completely within his control, or was there something different about his pattern of lies?” The crimes committed by some pathological liars include theft, swindling, forgery, and plagiarism. “It is worth noting, however, that some pathological liars are successful professionals without any public record of crime.”

“Welcome to post-truth politics,” wrote Paul Krugman. “Why does Mr. Romney think he can get away with this kind of thing? Well, he has already gotten away with a series of equally fraudulent attacks. In fact, he has based pretty much his whole campaign around a strategy of attacking Mr. Obama for doing things that the president hasn’t done and believing things he doesn’t believe.

Greg Sargent sees a common theme to Mitt’s calumnies: falsely portraying Obama as a bogeyman who doesn’t share American values. “But won’t there be some blowback?” Krugman wondered. “Won’t Mr. Romney pay a price for running a campaign based entirely on falsehoods? He obviously thinks not, and I’m afraid he may be right.”

And why not, when the watchdog website Politifact, purportedly established to enforce truth in politics, proclaimed Democratic “claims” that Republicans voted to end Medicare its “Lie of the Year”? The deceptive voucher system for which the GOP did indeed vote would cost each retiree thousands of dollars more out of pocket each year.

I found only two comments posted under one liberal blog disparaging one of Mitt’s most dastardly prevarications. “Despicable,” wrote the first. “I’m pretty sure that by November, every American voter will know what a hollow liar he is.”

The second commenter, however, disagreed, blaming the usual suspects. “Maybe not,” she warned. “It seems like 90 percent of the supposedly ‘credible’ media is carrying water for Willard. It’s so disgraceful.”

Writer Emily Theroux worked as magazine editor for The Times Herald-Record. Illustrator Lance Theroux was assistant managing editor of The Times Herald-Record before becoming a staff editorial artist for The Record in North Jersey.

Karl Rove, mastermind of the GOP disinformation campaign

By Emily Theroux

The GOP’s refusal in recent years to deal in the currency of facts has flown in the face of an edict widely credited to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” The perspective of the entire Republican Party has been subsumed by a kind of mass denial of reality that relegates “facts” to the last millennium, the enlightened era before America’s own King George W. assumed the throne.

“Bush’s Brain,” diabolical conservative mastermind Karl Rove, first defined the new world order in 2004. During an interview with writer Ron Suskind, Rove stated cryptically and with appalling arrogance that people who lived in what Rove termed “the reality-based community” believed that “solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. … That’s not the way the world really works any more,” Rove opined. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Ever since Rove and his fellow neocons’ immense hubris inspired them to forsake empiricism in favor of empire, they gave loyal followers permission to reinvent themselves as players of “history’s bit parts,” existing in a bubble of misinformation, revisionism, creationism, nativism, and science denial. If the reactionaries aren’t satisfied with the “tangibles” that reality throws their way, they can always swaddle themselves in Karl Rove’s Orwellian cocoon, where black is white, lies are truth, conservatism is compassionate, corporations are people, and the world is 6,000 years old despite the extensive fossil record. When the conservative faithful feel cornered by reason or statistics or scientific evidence, they can opt out of “the reality-based community” any time they choose by flipping on Sean Hannity or streaming Glenn Beck, then retreating into a “fact-free zone” of philistinism and folly.

Sometimes, Republicans are confronted with the embarrassing truth about their stubborn ignorance or outright lies when an issue or policy suddenly proves politically inconvenient for them. Take, for example, the embarrassing necessity for Virginia’s “Governor Ultrasound,” Bob McDonnell (hoping to be drafted as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential candidate) to backtrack on his “principled” insistence that rape victims, too, must undergo mandatory ultrasounds and be forced to view the resulting fetal images, just like everyone else waiting in line to clear GOP hurdles to obtaining an abortion. When that kind of cosmic retribution occurs, Republican candidates can follow Rove’s dubious lead and choose one or more of the following five options:

1. Change the subject to some bogus controversy you can blame on the Democrats. “Reality-averse” pols like Mitt Romney, who is truly cynical – and fully aware that this ploy is a zero-sum game designed to obliterate his opponent – have deliberately set up these false constructs (the phony “mommy wars,” for example, designed to distract voters from the very real Republican “war on women”). Indeed, everything, to Romney, is a precisely calibrated political calculation. Like a twisted wingnut version of a Bob Dylan song scored by “Turdblossom” Rove, Mitt doesn’t even fart without first testing which way the wind is blowing.

2. Take credit for your opponents’ accomplishments. When President Obama mounts a successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden, tell voters that if it hadn’t been for Bush and Cheney’s meticulous planning (during all of those years after Dubya said he “wasn’t all that interested” in finding bin Laden), the coup of the century never would have happened. When 1.2 million jobs are created since June 2009 under Obama’s watch, count jobs lost before Obama’s stimulus bill took effect so you can say “he” lost 1.86 million jobs; then use phony-baloney numbers of jobs created by Staples long after Romney left Bain Capital so you can claim “he” created 100,000 jobs. When the American auto industry makes a startling comeback after you wrote an editorial titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” claim as much credit for it as your lying mouth can possibly fabricate.

3. Turn your own failures around and blame them on your political foes. Characterize the historic downgrading of America’s credit rating, which resulted from the refusal of congressional Republicans to raise the debt ceiling for months on end in 2011, as the result of “high unemployment, big government, and ‘unsustainable debt’” caused by President Obama’s fiscal policies.

4. Turn to any of the fraudulent “authoritative” foils you rely on to issue “expert” guidance, official policy positions, or “model” legislation – such dynamic, partisan think tanks and lobbying conglomerates as the Heritage Foundation (funded by those clever Koch boys, who are as rich as God) or the furtive American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose member corporations prefer to slink around in the shadows so they don’t jinx their cushy tax dodge. Another option: For your next campaign event, call the bogus “activist” operation, FreedomWorks, whose own Dick Armey can rustle up a cast of boisterous “rent-a-redneck” subcontractors before you can shake a stick.

5. Get your “talking points” from focus-group guru Frank Luntz – called the “mack daddy” (translation: biggest, pimpingest bad-ass) of GOP strategists by Current TV’s Cenk Uygur. Then annihilate those dirty Dems by bellowing the bull that every other Republican talking head is bellowing, on every media venue you can get yourselves booked onto for the next four days. You’ll find that you get particularly good mileage out of Faux News, where sympathetic hosts will toss you softball questions, and “low-information” target audiences (who never watch anything other than Fox’s regurgitated extremist pablum) will generally swallow every last disingenuous word you say.

By Emily Theroux

So I go out of town for one blissful three-day weekend with my baby granddaughter and return home to discover that all hell has broken loose on the Sunday morning bobblehead front.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker apparently sold out President Obama on Meet the Press while I was out of cable TV and RSS-feed range, and I had little occasion (between shape-sorting brightly colored blocks, spooning mashed zucchini into Dulcinea’s Kewpie-doll mouth, and taking roughly a gazillion photos) to surf my cell phone. By the time I returned to electronic “civilization,” Booker had already backtracked twice – once after the Obama campaign had very likely chewed him out for his shocking transgression (in a YouTube clarification that MSNBC’s Morning Joe dubbed “the hostage video”), and then more vehemently the following day, after the RNC put up an online petition asking voters to step up to the plate and pledge, in raging capitals, “I STAND WITH CORY.”

“Don’t Let The Obama Campaign Silence Support For Job Creation,” the petition lead-in began.

“Yesterday New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker, a surrogate spokesman for the Obama campaign called the president’s attacks on the free market ‘ridiculous’. That’s right Mr. President, we aren’t going to let you destroy free enterprise. Stand up for America. Stand up for job creators.” (That’s verbatim; no courtesy corrections, not even for making Booker mayor of a state. I don’t think they deserve any.)

First of all, what a crock of crap! Can somber scenes of laid-off steelworkers recounting what Romney’s private-equity firm did to them really be viewed as “nauseating”? The ad shone a floodlight on how aptly Bain Capital’s notorious 1980s “money shot” (a spoof photo of Mitt and his colleagues brandishing $10 and $20 bills) depicted what the firm was doing when it shifted its focus from venture-capital investments in promising start-ups to leveraged private-equity buyouts of mature companies, which were designed to maximize Bain’s profits, not to either create or save jobs.

Secondly, what gives with Cory Booker and Harold Ford, Jr. (who said he wouldn’t have backed away from Booker’s original position)? Has Booker secretly signed on as a right-wing tool? Did RNC chair Reince Priebus co-opt Ford? Are both of them in the back pockets of Wall Street campaign donors with a big ax to grind against Obama for “scapegoating” Wall Street bankers over the recession and “demonizing” capitalism?

As it turns out, the award-winning blog ThinkProgress reported in 2002 that Booker and his slate of candidates received a total of $565,000 in donations from venture capitalists, investors, and Wall Street bankers during his first mayoral race – including $36,000 from Bain Capital. Ford, a former Tennessee congressman, worked for Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley after leaving public office. Other Democrats who rushed to Bain’s defense after Booker spoke out on Meet the Press included former Obama economic adviser and “car czar” Steve Rattner, who spent his career working at Lehman Brothers and other Wall Street firms, and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a wealthy and successful venture capitalist before serving in public office. The Romney campaign has since turned the criticisms of Obama’s ad by Booker, Ford, and Rattner into a campaign ad.)

From all the cable TV chatter, you would think that this enormous gift to Mitt Romney from Cory Booker, et. al., was bought and paid for by the Koch Brothers, Karl Rove, or any number of GOP Super PACs. It appears, however, that Booker – described in The Washington Post as “more crazy like a fox” than merely crazy – may have done something that made progressives “livid” in order to please financial-sector donors and put some political distance between himself and Obama, to whom he is constantly compared.

But the truth about this huge brouhaha over campaign tactics may end up being that nothing really substantive has changed in the presidential race since last week, when Mitt responded to a reporter’s question about a nasty remark he had made weeks earlier to Sean Hannity on the topic of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright: “I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was.” Them’s not fightin’ words; them’s weasel words – classic Romney equivocation, deliberate ambiguity. Dancing on the head of a pin so no one can pin him down.

Pretending to “stand by” positions or “stand with” fellow politicians definitely has its downside for the Romney campaign, whose staffers have their hands full trying to stifle any off-the-cuff remarks and make sure he’s routinely “teleprompted.” The ludicrous “I STAND WITH CORY” contretemps is merely a smokescreen for the likelihood that Romney himself lacks an effective means of disputing what the Obama ad campaign reveals about him and the “business expertise” he touts as evidence that he’s a “job creator” – at least no means other than crying “character assassination” or taking advantage of Democratic gaffes.

Nevertheless, the bobbleheads persist in believing that this lapse in party unity spells doom for the president; it helps ward off any possible insinuation that they harbor the dreaded “liberal media bias” of which they are so often accused by the right wing. “The last time I saw the mainstream media this unified in their certainty that Obama had made a political blunder was the beginning of the ‘war on women’,” read a comment posted on a progressive blog. While the Democrats worry about damage to the president’s campaign, Mitt is floundering about trying to defend himself against both the ongoing Obama campaign to hold him accountable for his business practices and a new Priorities USA ad that consists of a running critique of Romney’s “vulture capitalism” by his former Republican rivals, who pulled no punches while each of them, in turn, tried like hell to overtake Mitt’s fairly steady 25 percent share of the primary vote.

“If Mitt Romney wants to talk about what a few Democrats have said about Bain, fine. We are going to talk about what prominent Republicans and ultraconservative superstars have said about Mitt Romney and Bain Capital,” proclaimed the progressive blog The People’s View. “Did the Republicans really think that exactly this wouldn’t be the response to their singing and dancing around Booker’s comments?” wrote the anonymous blogger. “This is the big leagues, Mr. Romney. This ain’t your Republican primary.”

Has public opinion changed since Cory Booker’s temporary defection gave Republicans a big fat bull’s-eye to pin to Obama’s back? It’s too early to tell, but The Star-Ledger’s NJ.com website slyly predicts that “Cory Booker’s defense of Wall Street may hurt his status with liberals, but it won’t hurt his bank account.” And why does the paper think Booker may have stepped so far out on a limb in defiance of Obama in the first place? “The Newark mayor has taken at least $491,000 in political contributions from the financial services industry in the last nine months … according to campaign filings with the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission and the Federal Election Commission.” For that matter, says a Princeton political history professor, Obama’s campaign coffers are also brimming with financial-sector loot – unless it’s true that, as the pundits claim, the president has recently been coming home from Wall Street fundraising forays with empty pockets.

From the lunatic fringe, Glenn Beck’s website The Blaze posed a fascinating query: “But is the pubic [sic] behind the Obama team taking the campaign in this direction?”

Sorry, answer inscrutable. (You have to subscribe to “GBTV,” Beck’s live video network, if you want to actually watch his worthless video. I would sooner ingest the extruded pink sludge that an online “10-most-disgusting” list said chicken nuggets and hot dogs are made from than give a single dime to that revolting rodeo clown.) Warning: Whatever you do, don’t Google “really disgusting substances” – unless you’d like to experiment with bulimia.

There are worse things, of course, and Glenn Beck is one of them.

Emily@zestoforange.com

By Emily Theroux
When Rick Perry was still in the running for the GOP Republican nomination, he called folks like Mitt Romney “vulture capitalists.”

The Mittster (half Mitt, half monster) made short work of Perry, as he later did of both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, by bombarding unfortunate primary states with brutal attack ads.

It’s quite true that Romney, as has often been said of him, lacks a certain basic empathy for other human beings, at least those to whom he is not related by blood or marriage. But as intensely repellent as I find Mitt Romney, even I thought that perhaps Perry was going about half a mile too far down one of those winding Texas roads when he compared Mitt with what we used to call a “turkey buzzard” in North Florida.

Then the Obama campaign released a powerful two-minute warning to those who believe that Romney’s “business credentials” are going to help him skip across the finish line in November. It came in the form of a new campaign ad featuring former steelworkers still bitterly angry that the jobs many of them had held down for 35 years had been callously slashed after Mitt the Ripper’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, announced to investors that they were going to Kansas City in 1993 to start hacking the dead wood from their newest “acquisition,” GST Steel.

“[Bain Capital] borrowed millions to modernize the facility, but it also used the borrowed funds to pay itself back for its initial investment in GST,” said Dave Helling of The Kansas City Star. “In 2001 – two years after Romney left Bain Capital – GST Steel declared bankruptcy, leaving more than 700 people out of work. … Obama supporters said Romney’s departure did not absolve him of responsibility for GST’s demise or its workers’ troubles, which included reduced health and pension benefits.”

“You load something up with debt – debt you know is going to cause it to fail – and you’re able to walk away from the misery you caused so many people,” Helling quoted David Foster, who negotiated for GST’s unionized workers, as saying. “That to me is all I need to know about the value statement of this particular candidate.”

“I am Mitt Romney, Destroyer of Livelihoods”
Romney is staking his entire campaign on his potential appeal to independent voters as a highly successful free-market business pioneer who “created tens of thousands of jobs” during his 15-year tenure as CEO of Bain. The conceit he wishes to project, however, relies on the willingness of the public to view him favorably as “Mitt Romney, Job Creator,” rather than “Mitt Romney, Destroyer of Livelihoods.” He’s happy to boast about Bain’s “success record” at bringing fledgling start-ups like Staples up to speed or nursing moribund companies like KB Toys and Totes, the umbrella company (which later merged with Isotoner), back to life, yet he has never been too keen on fessing up to the downside of the private equity racket. The tools in the raider’s toolkit include “roll-ups” (which force one or more firms in the same industry to merge in order to cut jobs, as Romney did with a company called Ampak in 1992), “drive-by-deals” (investing in a start-up with the goal of a quick exit strategy), and “buy, strip, and flip” (buying out a target firm, usually with a leveraged buyout, stripping most of the equity, and getting out quickly).

“I never thought of what I do for a living as ‘job creation,'” said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain. “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”

That blunt reaction, from a business partner who knew Romney well, puts what such firms actually do in relatively matter-of-fact terms. Equity capitalism is by nature an opportunistic business model that oozed into the nasty little crevices left behind by Reaganomics’ “trickle-down” theory, after it failed utterly to dribble a scrap of anything down to the middle and lower classes. The faucets of opportunity ran bone-dry in working-class neighborhoods that bore the brunt of recession, decreasing tax revenues, and increasing unemployment, while fountains of obscene wealth were being showered on those who had already climbed the ladder (or were born on its top rung).

Returning to full employment in this country by creating the kinds of stable jobs that once paid a living wage – and provided much-needed benefits as well as a social safety net for retirees – is no longer even compatible with the interests of this new, radical brand of capitalism. Downsizing the workforce, outsourcing jobs, allowing the infrastructure to crumble, and drastically cutting spending on social programs are a sign of the times and the wave of the future. The jobs that Romney so heartlessly eliminated are not coming back – and don’t expect him to feel any compunction about it. Empathy is simply not in his vocabulary.

“Success” is measured by whoever is doing the measuring, and when they are doing it. A successful outcome in 1992 for Romney the businessman would have been manipulating the acquired company’s structure in such a configuration that it would “earn” the greatest possible amount of profit for investors, while a successful outcome in 2012 for Romney the candidate would be convincing independent voters that his true goal is creating thousands of well-paying jobs for unemployed workers. (A successful outcome for the former employees of failed companies like GST Steel and Ampac would have been convincing a stoic and unresponsive Romney, for the first time in his privileged life, to view workers, rather than corporations, as people.)

This breakthrough would require a level of heart and soul that Romney may not ultimately possess. Consider the following arresting fact, just for the sake of argument: An opinion piece in Sunday’s New York Times titled “Capitalists and Other Psychopaths” revealed the startling results of two recent psychological studies. The first demonstrated that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” as opposed to only 1 percent of the general populace. The second study revealed that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat, and break the law.

People who are incapable of empathy or remorse, who make stuff up about their records and conceal wrongdoing they’ve engaged in throughout their lifetimes, people like the Enron Gang who commit accounting fraud, people who think (or know) they won’t get caught for tax evasion, people who participate in “toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, and perjury” all fall under op-ed writer William Deresiewicz’s withering scrutiny.

No wonder Richard Cohen of The Washington Post said of Romney, “Lying isn’t a sin; it’s a business plan.” (And please note: neither Deresiewicz nor I called Mitt Romney a “psychopath.” His penchant for prevarication, however, has been widely observed and remarked upon by the press. Daniel Benen, formerly of Talking Points Memo and now writing for The Rachel Maddow Blog, has been keeping a weekly weblog recording the plethora of lies that Romney is caught telling every day – without even having access to all the ones he gets away with.)

‘What Do Psychopaths Want?’
But still it’s worth asking: What do psychopaths actually do? While there is no established psychiatric definition, certain personality characteristics predominate among people categorized as psychopathic:

1) Psychopaths have been observed to be almost entirely bereft of empathy and unable to appreciate other people’s experiences or motivations. (When Bain was in the process of shutting down a failed company, according to a former employee, Romney never suggested doing anything to save workers’ jobs. “It was very clinical,” he said. “Like a doctor. When the patient is dead, you just move on to the next patient.”)

2) Psychopaths tend to be intolerant, shallow, fearless, and unable to feel shame. (“I’m unemployed, too,” Mitt the Multimillionaire” told a group of jobless citizens; he failed to see why that statement wasn’t funny and might even be offensive. One former staffer said Romney had “a particular blind spot for people as people.”)

3) Psychopaths can be extremely anxious people. (“Mitt was always worried that things weren’t going to work out – he never took big risks,” said one of his colleagues. “Everything was very measurable. I think Mitt had a tremendous amount of insecurity and fear of failure.”)

4) Psychopaths can be pathological liars who frequenty exploit and manipulate other people. (“The president is planning on cutting $1 trillion out of military spending.” “We’ve got a president in office three years, and he does not have a jobs plan yet. I’ve got one out there already and I’m not even president, yet.” “I went off on my own. I didn’t inherit money from my parents.” Romney also said once “Obamacare” is implemented, “government at all levels” will “consume” 50 percent of the American economy.”)

5) Psychopaths can be impulsive and irresponsible, and often have a low tolerance for boredom. (“It is the opinion of some of Romney’s friends … that the repetitive business of campaigning simply bores him and that this boredom is responsible for the fairly sizable gap between the charismatic man they know in private and the battery-powered figure who often appears in public,” wrote Benjamin Wallace-Wells in New York magazine.)

6) Psychopaths frequently say strange and incoherent things. (All right, I’m still not making any accusations, but just consider the following statements: “I like to fire people who perform services to me.” “The trees here are just about the right height.” “Strange things are happening to me.” “Who let the dogs out? Who? Who?”)

But perhaps the most lasting effect Romney’s strange personality has made on an institution to date was his vainglorious self-regard and creepy propensity for inspiring other people to emulate him. “Bain partners think the profits they made are a sign of their brilliance,” said David Foster, a former steelworkers union official who negotiated labor contracts with GST management from 1994 until the company’s bankruptcy. “It’s not brilliance. It’s lurking around the corner and mugging somebody.”

Just wait and see if we fail to communicate our alarm about this strange bird to enough other people, what kind of mark a Romney presidency might leave on the White House.

By Emily Theroux

My best friend, Jim, is a Georgia native who escaped the backwaters of the Deep South after growing up there, just as I did. Since 1996, when I wandered one summer afternoon into his Middletown quilt shop, Jim and I have shared a multitude of interests. We’ve walked miles together to stay in shape, collaborated on making pillows and curtains for clients, ranted about the sorry state of American politics, watched Rachel Maddow eviscerate conservatives, traded good books, and gossiped about everything from obnoxious acquaintances to attractive men. Jim taught me how to make quilts, and I helped him figure out how to navigate Facebook. We spend a solid hour or more on Skype every few days, planted in front of our computer screens only blocks apart.

Both of us are married – me for 15 years; Jim, technically, for three-quarters of one. My spouse is a man, and so is his. Last fall, after same-sex marriage became legal in New York, Jim was finally able to wed Gary, his longtime partner, on the 35th anniversary of the day they met.

Jim is a singular individual, not a demographic statistic or a societal scapegoat to be trotted out any time a televangelist needs a reason why God hates hurricane victims, or an office-seeker wants to scare “values voters” for political gain. Jim did not “choose” to be gay (as the ignorant and the powerful alike insist), and his identity encompasses a great deal more than his sexual orientation. In a blog Jim recently began writing, he summed up his reaction to being objectified by politicians who revile him and religious proselytizers who think they can change him: “To put it simply, I am tired of  ‘sitting in the back of the bus.’ I am tired of being labeled. I am tired of being discriminated against. I am tired of religious nutbags calling me ‘evil’ and ‘degenerate’ and blaming me for natural disasters. I am tired of political candidates using me by declaring that I am ‘morally depraved’ and responsible for destroying the ‘sacred family unit,’ while, at the same time, these politicians hide behind Jesus (I was taught that Jesus was all about love, not hate) to justify their relentless prejudices and religious intolerance. To everyone who thinks they’re ‘normal’ and I’m not: How the hell does my being married have any effect on your life?”

Both parties ‘categorize’ voters, but for different reasons

My friend sees himself as a person who happens to have diverse connections to all kinds of other people, not a “gay man” – a distinction that evades those who marginalize other people by assigning them to groups identified by a common race, ethnicity, creed, gender, or sexual orientation. The resulting “demographics” have been used by members of both major political parties to make electoral calculations. Democrats tend to focus on “minority” social groups in order to help them succeed in a society steeped in exclusion of the powerless. While their motivations to help the less fortunate may indeed be genuine, Democratic politicians still hope to win the votes of members of the demographic groups they are assisting without losing those of “independents,” whom they cannot so readily categorize. Republicans often isolate targeted social groups in order to demonize them and thereby divide potential voters into “us” (primarily wealthy white businessmen, along with “low-information” voters who hope to emulate their success) versus “them” (Democrats, racial and ethnic minorities, feminists, gays and lesbians, and non-Christians).

A North Carolina amendment making same-sex marriage unconstitutional passed all too easily because it employed gay stereotypes to appeal to the ignorance and bigotry of the majority. Few who voted in favor of it knew that the amendment would also invalidate domestic unions between unmarried opposite-sex couples and dissolve domestic-violence protections. The Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, said advocates of the law were asking the wrong question for a democracy – as often happens when civil rights issues are submitted to the popular vote of a poorly informed electorate that has already been brainwashed against the targeted group. “The question shouldn’t be, ‘How do you feel about same-sex marriage?’ but do you let the majority rule against the rights of the minority?”

The Democrats, although they don’t share the ruthless Republican agenda of targeting gays and lesbians to polarize the electorate, are not entirely blameless when it comes to politicizing them. In 1996, while running for the Illinois state senate, Barack Obama indicated on a survey that he favored legalizing gay marriage, but by the time he ran against black conservative Alan Keyes for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he began to voice “religious reservations.” Polls of churchgoing black voters revealed a general cultural disapproval of gay “sinners,” and Obama needed the vast majority of the black vote to win his Senate seat. When he announced his presidential bid in 2007, Obama said he opposed same-sex marriage but approved of civil unions. By 2011, a spokesman said Obama believed the issue was “best addressed by the states” (a loaded historical reference that angered even Obama’s gay campaign donors), while adding that committed same-sex couples should receive “equal protection under the law.”

Obama’s views on marriage equality ‘evolved’ at a snail’s pace

Critics roundly lambasted Obama for dragging his feet on the issue of marriage equality. There was no question that he had done more for LGBT Americans than any president ever had. Yet Obama continued to claim, with increasingly less credibility, that his position on same-sex marriage was “evolving.” Then Joe Biden opened his big mouth once again and told David Gregory on Meet the Press that he was “entirely comfortable” with same-sex marriage. The following day, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan echoed Biden’s endorsement of marriage equality. By that time, the president’s hesitation to follow the lead of his own administration had begun to look like “vacillation” or worse, “poor leadership.” Once the North Carolina ban passed, the pressure became overwhelming for Obama to make his position on marriage equality clear.

It was taking too long to “build a more perfect union,” as the president had promised in October 2010. So President Obama changed course rather abruptly by declaring during an interview that his evolution on the issue was complete, and that he was now in favor of full marriage equality.

Hostilities commence after president ‘declares war on marriage’

Now that the president has uttered the historic words, what happens next? The fear of alienating black voters must have long appeared well-founded to a man living in a virtual bubble. Yet one conservative blogger opined that, given the wretched state of the economy, open support for same-sex marriage probably wouldn’t cost Obama very many black votes. A surprising 60 percent of the vote in North Carolina counties with black majorities was cast in favor of banning same-sex marriage, but Barack Obama’s name was nowhere on the ballot.

Reaction from the right was fast and furious, though predictable. “Obama Flip Flops, Declares War on Marriage” shrieked Fox News Nation’s headline. Eric Cantor triumphantly tweeted, “With the economy in stagnation and crippling amounts of debt, the President seeks to further divide America by launching in [sic] a culture war.” The Log Cabin Republicans condemned Obama for being “a day late and a dollar short” by waiting to speak out until the day after LGBT activists lost the North Carolina vote.

My friend Jim, however, wasn’t so quick to condemn the president, even after waiting such an interminable length of time before at last seeing his position vindicated. “Finally!” Jim said. “Needless to say, I’m very happy that he has chosen to stand up for our civil rights, which is what it’s all about for me. I will certainly vote for him for president now.

“This issue was seriously affecting his presidency, and I think he just had to come to terms with it,” observed Jim, whose final assessment was blunt and to the point. The president’s choice, in the end, Jim said, “was to s**t or get off the pot, and he finally s**t.”

Stand fast, compatriots! The onslaught from the other side, an entire raft of it, has only just begun to fly.