Welcome to Awards Edition Plus, your one-stop snark shop sitting in for Bill in Portland Maine and Cheers and Jeers. I hear Bill is taking the day off to clean out his closet. He opened the door and anti-marriage equality activist Michael Heath fell out. That's got to be a hot mess!
The lobby of the cesspool of snark.
So, while Bill is busy with his closet, join Awards Edition Plus for a romp in the cesspool of snark. Today, Lenin Cat breaks down the Romney campaign in the Awards Edition Plus Editorial; the News of Dubious Veracity Department brings you news you can't use, and of course, the Golden Douchenozzle Award nominees.
Come splash with us over the orange cloud of effluence...
Awards Edition Plus Editorial
by Lenin Cat
Romney's Messaging Problem
There's a lot of speculation out there about why Mitt Romney's performance in this race is sluggish at best in an election that according to David Brooks should be a "cakewalk" for the GOP. The punditocracy is all a-twitter over nothing fitting the narrative they trot out every four years. No one seems to know why Romney is losing because everyone knows he's broken all his promises and is a big disappointment to voters.
Well, I know why the Romney campaign has been so unsuccessful in its courtship of voters, and it's not because conservatism is being failed by the American people. It's message confusion, plain and simple.
The GOP in general and the Romney/Ryan campaign in particular suffer from what I call "message confusion". This is not just an issue of being a little disorganized or having a tendency to veer off point. It's a fundamental, ground-up flaw in messaging that results in too many peripheral issues taking centre stage.
This is why the Obama campaign has been so successful in painting Romney as an unattractive candidate while remaining vague itself on some of the specifics of the President's agenda. It's why Ann Romney has been so successful in painting her husband as a cold, greedy sonofabitch who is also possibly mentally unstable. At a core level, the GOP lacks clarity of message. It suffers from "message confusion".
If the Republicans and the Romney campaign would simply stop confusing their message with racism, homophobia, misogyny, perpetual war, paranoid know-nothing nativism, religious intolerance and purulent anti-intellectualism and instead focus on their ideological strengths of privatizing and eliminating the social safety net, neutering labor unions, and promoting South American style neo-feudalism while prying into your uterus, Romney and Ryan would surely be cleaning Obama's clock.
Think about it.
--Lenin Cat
News of Dubious Veracity Department
via the Washington Post and Beam Online:
Backbencher Recommends New Southern Strategy
Buffalo, Wyoming. You've probably never heard of Wyoming Democratic congresswoman Julie Carruthers, and that's because she's a junior legislator from Wyoming, but this backbencher has a bold plan for taking back congress: a new Southern Strategy for the Democratic Party. "How come the Republicans get all the racists? Now I know LBJ said in 1965 that the Civil Rights Act would lose the South for the Democrats for a generation, but it's been a generation at least since then. It's time for racists to come home to the Democratic Party". Rep. Carruthers' strategy is actually pretty simple. "Look, if the Democratic Party would offer more in the way of, you know, racism and misogyny in its platform, if Democrats would start blowing those dogwhistles just a little bit, we might be able to convince the cornpone and pork jowls crowd that our economic policies are more in their interest and get them to vote for progressive economic policies which actually benefit them, not the 1 percent. I think if there were a real choice where both parties offered some degree of racism, we'd be winning in the South...
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too bad this has a kernel of truth in it.
You Can't Make This Shit Up Department
First, Mitt Romney was rumored to be preparing to not answer any questions at the debates, merely talk about those things he wanted to talk about. You know, like happy talk, things you like to do. Happy, happy, happy happy talk. Like that. Now, it seems, he's preparing a repertoire of one-liners the campaign is calling Zingers.
Zingers? YUM.
And now, without further ado, it's:
The Golden Douchenozzle Award Nominees
This is a great week for nominees, not so much because of who they are--the usual suspects--but because of just how much asshattery there is out there. Take a look:
Paul Ryan gets pwoned by none other than Fox News because he won't give specifics on how he's going to give us a revenue neutral tax cut. Because it would "take too long" or he can't tell us because it is all bullshit something. Here's a man who makes a big deal out of what he calls "truth telling" (and we call "lies") but apparently, he's so truthy we should just trust him. Total douchenozzle.
Ann Coulter goes on The View to talk about how racist liberals are. That's like bringing a hyena to a kaffeeklatsch. Oh, wait a minute.
Paul LePage has a problem: not even his own Secretary of State wants him campaigning for him. Neither would I, if I were running against Angus King.
Maggie Gyllenhaal, an actress I normally like well enough but never seems to be the Gyllenhaal I think of when I think Gyllenhaal, for her role in a propaganda film attacking teacher's unions. This is a nomination for hypocrisy: it takes, to quote Big Dog, some "brass" to make an anti-union movie with a SAG card in your purse. Dontchathink?
GOP Voter Registration Drives which in several states seem to be committing voter registration fraud and are now suspended. Funny how all the voter ID laws in the world couldn't prevent Republicans from committing fraud, something they do every time they open their mouths or wake up in the morning.
Ann Romney has been doing quite a bit to help the Obama campaign lately, but remains a total asshat--if you're Mitt Romney. Her public questioning of her husband's emotional fitness to be President while her husband is, you know, running for President has to be one of the best examples of asshattery I've seen in a while.
So, who wins the award? Tell us in the poll, and tell us what you're cheering and jeering about today. Happy Monday!