Et tu, Althouse?

Then fall, Romney! St. Ann of the Badgers *unloads* on the Mittster.

Then fall, Romney!

When Althouse turns on a Republican, she does so with righteous wrath:

Romney’s low on cash?! What the hell did he spend it on?

And now he wants more… That seems awfully dependent, as though we have a responsibility to care about him. I’ll never convince him to take personal responsibility and care for his own campaign.

Note that Althouse still hates workers as much as she ever did. She’s just giving herself some distance from the coming trainwreck. Her commenters are still mostly in deep denial.

Author: Mark Kleiman

Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out. Books: Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken) When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993) Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989) UCLA Homepage Curriculum Vitae Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com

17 thoughts on “Et tu, Althouse?”

  3. While most all of us are delighted about this campaign implosion, let us not forget that October is close at hand. Expect a culture war bomb to go off within the next few weeks. The R’s always save their worst for last.

      1. “Obama intentionally had nothing to do with Fast and Furious! That way he made his critics look bad and paved the way for seizing our guns!”

    2. I’d be really surprised if they could come up with anything that got any traction. They seem to be in a closed loop where they’re sure any nothingburger they concoct will just blow the campaign apart, like the “redistribution” thing they just tried. It had the third of the country that already hates Obama frothing, but nobody else cared that much. They start with the premise that all right-thinking Americans should naturally hate Obama down to their toes so everything they do is aimed at getting the rest of us to feel the hate. But that’s a deep reaction they can’t just set off in people who don’t already start out with it. Real scandal or rationality are the only things left. If they had a real scandal they’d have dropped it by now; it isn’t for lack of trying that they don’t have one now. As for rationality, well, enough said.

    3. let us not forget that October is close at hand. Expect a culture war bomb to go off within the next few weeks. The R’s always save their worst for last.

      Yep. I have no idea what it might be, but the vibe I’m picking up on the net lately is that the R’s have something cooking, and they think it’s big. Keeping in mind that they thought “redistribution” was big, and are still beating the Fast & Furious dead horse, along with a touch of lingering birtherism, I’m taking it with the appropriate measure of salt, of course.

      1. There may be an October Surprise and it wouldn’t surprise me, but few are frothing over Rmoney. He is an arrogant jerk, and there are plenty of Rs who don’t like that. They’ll pull the lever but won’t like it one bit. As opposed to those pulling the lever to fire the uppity Kenyan.

      1. Looked at one way, 28th place is almost embarrassingly bad. On the other hand, it was 28th best in the entire world, and with Romney/Ryan policies 28th place might seem like quite an aspirational target. Heaven knows, the American health system whose defects they want to double down on probably isn’t 28th best in the world (though we do spend about 50% more per GDP than just about anyplace else in the world, with the countries unexpectedly close to us being mostly small island nations plus a couple of dirt-poor West African republics).

  5. Anyone remember Pete McCloskey (R, CA) from the early 1970s? He was a Republican from 1948 until just recently, but was a very interesting bird when in Congress, entering several presidential primaries against Nixon in 1972, based on his principled opposition to the war in Vietnam.

    McCloskey was quite an outlier even in his day, but it was possible for the GOP of that day to retain guys like him in its ranks. Hell, he was even a sponsor of the Endangered Species Act in the early 70s!

    One good reason to hope for a landslide election this time: fairly soon there need to be some Pete McCloskeys in that party. He is still living, but I do not know what he is up to at age 84. Last I heard about him was when he was opposing the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We need people like him to come along and say to the teabaggers and the Randroids and the birthers, “Step aside and let the grownups run this party for a while.”

    A two party system only works when both parties have plausible claims to sanity. A party which awards the chairmanship of a state organization to a man who thinks that the president’s actual father was not Barack Obama, Sr., but was an American communist who begat the child Obama in order to someday impose communism on the United States, deserves to forfeit its fortunes entirely.

    Any Pete McCloskey types out there? Please come in. You are urgently needed.

    1. The problem is, the Republicans seem to be too far gone for this. The inmates aren’t just in charge; you have to hunt far and wide to find a national Republican under 60 who isn’t crazy, or at least doesn’t assiduously act crazy to avoid expulsion. Even in the older generation, you’re left with nonentities like the Maine Twins (haven’t bucked the party line, nor spoken up in any way, since the Stimulus passed) and anomalies like Bloomberg (only nominally a Republican; really more sui generis). You mourn McCloskey’s public career, quite rightly: but the real tragedy is that, so far as I can tell, you are joined in this by precisely no Republicans with any standing, power, or influence. The party would rather hear a heavyset bully gloat and see a cranky old man yell at a chair than it would like to put a smiley face on and pretend even to aspirations of sanity or comity, even when trying to appeal to the undecided voter in free primetime television.

      Any project to restore sanity to the Republican party would be rejected by the preponderance of the party’s current members, by all of its street-level activists, and by the big donors and independent funders. Such a project would take a generation, to boot. In the meantime, we may be feeling pretty good about the polls right now, but remember: even in our best-case scenario, come January the Republicans will have almost 50% of the House, perhaps 45 Senators, and about 48% of the votes cast for President, Representative, or Senator - and it’s at least as likely as not the Republicans will hold on to the House, and they haven’t lost the Presidential election yet. Their party may be truly mental, but the price they’ll pay for it is not going to monumental, not any time soon.

      And if you’re wrong - if they don’t start back on the road to sanity - the signs aren’t great. The Republicans may be nuts, but they’re not out of the game. If they stay nuts, the obvious answer would be for their party to fade away, and the Democrats to split. Heaven knows, the Democratic coalition is a disparate one. But I have a hard time imagining this working, at least imagining it working well …

    2. I know some moderate current and former Republicans (including a former boyfriend, who left the party in anger over the various attempts by Republicans to justify torture — he was and still is serious about human rights and social justice).

      But all of them have either gone independent or seem to be despondent about the takeover by the extreme right. None of those who are still members of the Republican party would stand a snowball’s chance in hell to be elected to any kind of office above the local level, I think.

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