“The website is really just the beginning. I think you’re talking about the potential collapse, not only of Obamacare as we have understood it, but potentially the insurance industry more basically.”
Stephen “Chicken Little” Hayes of The Weekly Standard on Fox News
Because it’s not enough to misinform “the folks,” we have to scare the crap out of them, too.
The Weekly Standard’s smarmy Bill Kristol, who shoulders much of the shame and blame for vaulting Sarah Palin onto the national stage after he met her during his magazine’s Alaskan cruise and fell head over heels, is encouraging Palin to run for Senate.
Really, this guy is one baby step above Anthony Weiner in letting his weiner make decisions for him.
I can’t imagine she will. Neither the McCain campaign nor the press properly vetted her during the ’08 campaign, but this time around, closets would open and skeletons would come crashing down.
The GOP rightly ridiculed Nancy Pelosi for saying of Obamacare that we need to pass the bill, so we can find out what’s in it. Americans don’t respond well to condescension and paternalism.
But now the GOP wants us to vote for Mitt Romney, who is essentially running as the proverbial pig in a poke. He wants us to elect him, so we can find out what’s in him.
Check out Stephen Hayes’ interview with Mitt, “The candidate attempts to reassure conservatives,” in The Weekly Standard:
“Mitt Romney wants to eliminate government programs and shutter cabinet agencies.
“But Romney, ever cautious, is reluctant to get specific about the programs he would like to kill.
“‘So I think it’s important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies. … So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.’
“Romney’s answer goes a long way to explain why some conservatives have been reluctant to embrace his candidacy. They want a list. They want it to be long, they want it to be detailed, and they want a candidate who is not only willing to provide one but eager to campaign on it.”
So basically they want a different candidate. Which is what all of us, not just conservatives, deserve.
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol is the not-very-bright son of a very bright and famous father, Irving Kristol, who used his contacts and influence to get Bill his exalted place in the world, a place he never would have achieved with his own limited talents.
Bill fell so madly in love with Sarah Palin on the Weekly Standard cruise to Alaska that he totally missed the fact that she’s a moron. He’s one of the Powers That Be that led to her getting chosen as McCain’s running mate. You won’t see all the guilty parties this Saturday night on Game Change. I’m also looking at you, Fred Barnes and Dick Morris.
Now he’s missing the fact that Mitt has the GOP nomination. He told Laura Ingraham today: “For the Romney campaign to suggest this is over is intellectually dishonest, frankly, and I think rubs Americans the wrong way. Only a third of the states have voted.”
And the remaining two-thirds will fall in line and give Mitt 1,144. Yeah, we have to go through the motions, but it’s over.
And so it begins, the push for a brokered GOP convention.
William Kristol, that caricature of an obnoxious, Inside-the-Beltway jerk, a mediocre man of wealth and influence solely because of nepotism (see Kristol, Irving), has a column in The Weekly Standard, “A Deliberative Convention,” that calls on the party to ditch the current cast of freaks and losers and nominate “none of the above.” He is encouraging others to enter the race to deny any of the current contenders enough votes for a first-ballot victory, and then he gleefully hopes to watch all hell break loose:
“It could fall to the Republican delegates convening in Tampa, after they have cast their committed first ballot vote and failed to produce a majority for any candidate, to act as a real deliberative convention. It could fall to them to use their judgment to select the best possible nominee for their party and the best possible president for their country.
“It could happen because it’s quite possible no one will emerge from the January primaries with a commanding lead in the delegate count…. It would be even more likely to happen if someone new were to respond to a draft and enter the race belatedly….
“And a deadlocked convention, which then became a deliberative convention, could be a good thing, because most sentient Republicans, and most conscientious conservatives, suspect we can do better than the current field.”
So here we go, and the drumbeat will just get louder.
The GOP doesn’t need any more illegitimacy associated with it. When Nixon resigned in 1974, the Vice President who took over, Gerald Ford, had been appointed, not elected, because of the resignation of the disgraced Spiro Agnew. So we had a president nobody had voted for.
In 2000, we had Florida and the hanging chads and Katherine Harris/Karl Rove/James Baker and the competing lawsuits and finally the hideous intervention of the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore to stop the pathetic circus the election had become. We had a president imposed on us by judicial fiat, we didn’t know if he deserved to be there or not. But for 9/11, that taint of illegitimacy would have hung over Bush for the rest of his term and may have cost him another one.
This is just the beginning of the brokered convention drumbeat.
Instead of de-legitimizing the electoral process, Billy Boy, why don’t you fix your sick party so that smart, decent, reasonable people aren’t too intimidated by Fox News and right-wing talk radio to run in the first place?
Now there’s an idea for the intellectual poseur Kristol to chew on.
Embattled Farmers 