Politirazzi

Today Now!: How To Pretend You Give A **** About The Election

A humorous look at feigning interest in the presidential election. From The Onion.

— Jeff

By Jeff

Gas prices are high. Who’s to blame? Someone is always to blame, right? When prices rise for consumers, there has to be some corporate fat-cat wearing a monocle and lighting cigars with $100 bills and cackling maniacally.

Multiple choice: What’s the main reason for higher gas prices?
A: Oil speculators
B: The Iraq war
C: Greedy oil executives

Let’s go to the Google. How many hits do I get if type in: “gas prices”, oil speculators? 561,000. For “gas prices”, Iraq war? 433K. For “gas prices”, record profits? 408K.

Pretty close. Purely based on Google hits, it appears that we can blame those evil oil speculators for driving up gas prices just like Sen. Obama’s recent pandering says (an opinion echoed by Bill O’Reilly). Of course this ignores the fact that every other commodity has also skyrocketed in price. Did all speculators from every industry conspire together to bid up every commodity?

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(AP)

By Jeff

Bob Barr isn’t going to be president; we know that for sure. He knows he’s not going to be president, and his ardent supporters know he isn’t going to be president. Third-party candidates don’t run to get elected, they run to gain visibility for their message, hoping that some of their core issues will gain traction and force the general election candidates to take a favorable stance.

Barr is certainly the highest-profile candidate to start a third-party run in my lifetime (nobody knew who Ross Perot was before he started). But the concern about Barr is how genuine are his beliefs. Barr was a Democrat in the '60s until being exposed to Ayn Rand. Then was a Republican until 2004, and has been a Libertarian since.

Now changing political parties isn’t a huge red flag since the move from Democrat to Republican in many cases really isn’t a very big difference; Reagan did it. Jim Webb did it. But Bob Barr sure seems to be changing his mind a lot, and we’ve learned from John Kerry, flip-flopping can paralyze the effectiveness of a candidate’s message.

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By Jeff

I work with a conspiracy theorist. She loathes George W. Bush and his “Crime Family” and is one of the people who think every random occurrence somehow ties back to Bush. She mentioned today that McCain was going to win because elections are all frauds and pre-determined by some cabal of powerful Illuminati. I also work near Ground Zero and am exposed to “9-11 Truthers” on nearly a daily basis.

I don’t really engage the woman at work about her nutty theories, and I’m not going to get into a point-by-point case against the various WTC theories because it’s been done a fair amount of times before. Nor am I going to try and explain away each and every other conspiracy theory attributed to Bush (e.g. he’s holding bin Laden for an October surprise to help McCain).

However, I’d like to walk through the logical progression and show why you can pretty much automatically dismiss any and all wide-ranging government conspiracy theory that someone tries to put in front of you.

(continued)

(AP)

By Jeff

Former Clinton supporters are going to be voting for Obama. They were always going to vote for Obama, no matter how much they pouted. I think even if Clinton hadn’t come out for Obama, her supporters would have still voted for him. The quasi-posturing about supporting McCain by her senior supporters was more about bargaining power and trying to get some assurances from an eventual Obama administration.

Now that Hillary has come out and backed Obama and is now making calls to get her pledged delegates to vote for Obama (though not officially releasing them for a reason), it’s even more likely that Clinton supporters will vote for Obama. Obama has already done whatever he needed to do apparently during the private Clinton-Obama meeting last week. We just don’t know what it was. It wasn’t a VP nod, that I’m sure of, but conventional wisdom says maybe it was a promise of Attorney General, Supreme Court Justice or as the shepherd in Congress for his health care plan. Or maybe it was just, “Hey, shut up; you lost. Go away or I will crush you.” That would have been my tactic.

This trend indicates that those Clinton supporters who previously may have been saying they were going to vote for McCain over Obama, are predictably now admitting that they plan on voting for Obama.

(AP)

By Jeff

CBS is reporting that Sen. Hillary Clinton will announce tonight her acceptance of the fact that Obama has won the majority of delegates. Finally admitting that she has lost her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Well, not really. That Obama has won? Well, not that either.

A senior Clinton campaign official confirms to CBS News that Hillary Clinton will "acknowledge but not concede" the race tonight. The official says "she has no plans to concede the race tonight."

So she will admit that Obama has more delegates, yet she will also remain in the race. For what purpose, exactly?

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By Jeff

The big mistake that the Democrats have made is their proportional method of assigning delegates. It’s just made it nearly impossible for either candidate to pull ahead. Continuing to do it this way will enable a lengthened primary season, and we’ve seen that the longer a race, the more it devolves into petty attacks. That only makes both candidates look worse.

The whole idea of “superdelegates” strikes me as extremely un-Democratic (meaning the party; not the adjective). The Democratic party is supposed to be the champion of the little folks; the downtrodden; making sure that everyone that all the evil Republicans ignore, gets a real voice. The Republicans are supposed to be the party where the elite sets the rules and everyone else just falls in line or gets trampled.

Yet, the Democrats have made it so less than 800 people control 20 percent of the possible Democratic delegates. If the delegates want to stereotypical “evil, selfish Republicans," they can withhold their vote and use it as a bargaining chip to cull favor with the eventual nominee (gee, I wonder why over 25 percent of superdelegates haven’t committed yet).

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By Jeff

As a follow-up to Meg’s post regarding just how ignorant many people are regarding this election and what are their (foolish) motives for choosing their candidate, it got me thinking about a recent blog post from Ben Smith, who makes the point that it’s actually surprising that "only" 10 percent of Americans think Barack Obama is a Muslim, given the striking ignorance Americans show in many other areas.

So, building off his base, here are a few more statistics about Americans that is really actually pretty depressing.

10 percent think Barrack Obama is Muslim.

18 percent think the sun revolves around the Earth.

19 percent accept the presence of spells and witchcraft.

22 percent think George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened.

(AP)

By Jeff

At the adult table (as always) is the Republican Illuminati of James Baker, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, a picture of baby Jesus and George W. Bush in his rocketship seat. At the kids table is all the people who may potentially be vice presidential candidates: Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Charlie Crist and Tim Pawlenty.

Poppa Bush says, “Alright men, while McCain’s back at the grill we need to determine — Dick, quit eating that puppy carcass for a second, this is important — by the end of this day, we’re going to decide who is assigned as vice presidential nominee. Rove, go.”

“Well, it really needs to be someone young and energizing to fight the Obamania factor, and someone with a strong conservative record to placate the core Gays/Guns/God crowd that doesn’t think McCain is conservative enough” as Karl looks over while Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee arm wrestle to see who gets to say grace. “It would also be ideal to get someone who could help us carry some swing states.”

Baker butts in, “I think we should start excluding some guys. We’ll get Florida even if Crist isn’t on the ticket — I made sure of that last time — plus he’s got white hair, and we’ve already got one of them. Huckabee is a nice guy, and I’m really impressed with his weight loss, but is it just me, or does he come off as a bit crazy? When he tries to be funny, it just kind of creeps me out. Liability.”

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By Jeff

Hillary Clinton is not winning the Democratic nomination. No way; no how. I soooooo need a break from the Democratic primary.

So instead, and since it appears as though I’m one of the few Politirazzi voices on “the right,” I’ll champion something that both Democratic candidates have been speaking out against: NAFTA, which has been a substantial benefit to all parties involved. But before I get into the stats, there are two major errors people make when demonizing NAFTA.

First, they assume that manufacturing jobs are all lost to “outsourcing,” when in fact many of them are lost due to either job obsoleteness or increased productivity. It’s not a bad thing to lose jobs. For instance, the buggy whip industry is dead — and isn’t everyone glad automobiles replaced horse transportation? The assembly line obsoleted even more jobs while dramatically increasing productivity. Microsoft has been the cause of mass job obsoleteness. Is there ANYONE who would argue that the technological revolution starting in the late '70s hasn’t been a historic boon to the global economy and society in general? Jobs are lost. Industries die. Economies adapt. Not only is it natural, but it’s good. The loss of manufacturing jobs is a secular change. China, where we are supposedly shipping all of our manufacturing jobs is shedding manufacturing jobs at a higher rate than the U.S., but their productivity is increasing.

(continued)

By Jeff

When the question was posed to me as to which ridiculous spectacle of the campaign annoyed me the most, my first reaction was, “can it be ‘all of the above'?” I finally settled on the pretty obvious Jeremiah Wright situation. First, the subject really had little to do with Sen. Obama but was given a lot of press just because of the incendiary tone of Wright’s comments. The clearly hostile-to-white America comments do not come close to sounding anything like anything ever being attributed to Obama in his life. In fact, Obama had already distanced himself from Wright in February of 2007, well before the public controversy erupted. Additionally, Obama immediately and repeatedly said that Wright did not speak for him or his campaign. So I really don’t know why people kept harping on Obama. What else was he supposed to do and say to convey the message that he disagreed with Reverend Wright?

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By Jeff

I think the president’s main job in any administration should be foreign policy. The president should spend the bulk of their time outside the country helping to establish, augment or leverage relationships around the world to improve the environment for America’s citizens and corporations. Domestic policy can be driven by the Congress and respective states, with obviously the president’s veto power acting as a check and balance. The need to focus internationally is magnified in this election due to the war(s) and the significantly eroded opinion of America held throughout the world after the Bush administration many abuses.

There are obviously many domestic issues that are also important to me (e.g. the farcical “war on drugs”, the civil rights issue of gay marriage, the Social Security ponzi scheme, fear of the Democrats attempts at nationalizing health care, an increasingly re-distributive tax code and general intrusiveness of the federal government both economically and personally) which will have a significant impact on my vote.

That said, my No. 1 issue of this general election cycle (if it ever gets started) will be how Obama and McCain discuss what will be their efforts to re-establish diplomacy around the world and repair America’s name in light of the Bush administration’s numerous international missteps and abuses of power.

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By Jeff

Margin of victory: 53% for Clinton to 45% for Obama and the odd 1% who either votes for Edwards, “none of the above”, or “undecided” which seems like a waste of a Tuesday night, especially when you can watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and War Games back-to-back on AMC starting at 6PM.

Media narrative: Will be twofold. First, the realization that for all the hullabaloo, this primary was pretty meaningless due to how the Democratic Party structured their primaries. Clinton will pick up about 10-15 delegates on Obama, which means that she’ll still be about 120-130 delegates http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_delegate_count.html behind him with only 384 delegates up for grabs in the remaining 7 primaries.

Which means, as everyone already knows, Clinton’s only chances to win the nomination are: 1) A miracle with the Florida/Michigan delegates, 2) a miracle with superdelegates leaving Obama (as a result of one of the many manufactured controversy-gates the Clinton camp is trying to stoke the fires around Obama) 3) a miracle at the convention.

So the second media narrative will be to try and figure out just when Clinton will give up and drop this charade. Will it be before the North Carolina primary (May 6th), immediately after, will she stick it out and wait for a miracle at the convention, or will Howard Dean kidnap her at some point in between?

Wow, so Senator Clinton just said that what works in New York may not work in Montana and so she doesn't think that the federal government shouldn't some sort of "blanket rules" that they're going to try to impose isn't going to work? That was about gun control, but does she realize the implications of that statement? SHE'S A LIBERTARIAN!!!! She wants to give more power to the states and have a limited federal government. I like her now!
— Jeff

(AP)

Intermission #2. The second part was certainly more engaging than the first. But I'd still call the GOP the big winner in this debate so far. The first hour of petty questions did nothing to make either Democratic candidate look good. The big loser: ABC (well, and the voting public).
— Jeff

Millionaires and billionaires have their payroll taxes capped, because their benefits are capped. If you want to do something to save Social Security, raise the age limit. It was 65 in the 30s, when the average life expectancy age was around 65. If the benefit age were indexed to life expectancy (like it should have been), the benefit age would be about 75 right now.
— Jeff

"Let me turn to the economy. That is the number one issue on American's minds, right now." So, let's wait until an hour and four minutes into the debate to bring it up!
— Jeff

Everyone wants the Iraq war to end as soon as possible, but to say that we’re going to get out no matter what — no matter what the commanders say — is a mistake. The president “sets the mission” as Obama says, sure. But you are a suit in Washington. You need to rely on what the military leaders to determine what is the mission. Also, Sen. Clinton again contradicts herself.

The talks out of one side of her mouth that President Bush made unilateral decisions to keep us in Iraq, and made poor decisions while there while many others disagree. Yet, she (and Sen. Obama) continue to say that no matter what the military experts think, they will both make the unilateral decision to remove us from Iraq.
— Jeff

Now that it's a commercial. I don't watch full debates often, but are they often this superficial? We're almost halfway through and there hasn't been one single policy question. It's all process. All Karl Rove type of BS. Gibson/Stephanopolous are part of the problem. This is insane.
— Jeff

"Do you believe in the American flag?" Ugh. Come on ABC. Is this a joke? I think we should turn all political debates over to Youtube. That debate had the best, most detailed, issue-oriented questions. It's official: the mainstream media is now obsessed with 10 second soundbites targeting people with 20 second attention spans. I'm sorry, but this "debate" has been downright painful so far.
— Jeff

25% of the way through the debate in "the most important election of our lifetimes" and not one single tangible meaningful issue has been brought up. Huzzah, Charlie and George!
— Jeff

Exactly, Obama. Sen. Clinton complains about the vast right wing conspiracy that continuously attacks her, and all their dirty tricks for the last 16 years. Yet, what her campaign has been doing over the past few months is EXACTLY what she's been complaining about. The 3 a.m. ad, and the ad harping on the "bitter" comment are two most recent examples.
— Jeff

Great "more questions on that same theme" regarding Bitter-gate. I can hardly wait!
— Jeff

Wow. Big first question. Damn. I wish Sen. Clinton answered first. She would have said "definitely I'd name him my running mate" and then Obama would have said "ahhhh, not so fast". That would have been fun. But she's no dummy, which is why she deferred to Sen. Obama. I think Hillary did a good job by making no question that her main goal is to have someone from the Democratic Party sworn in come January.
— Jeff

How many times will "Bittergate" be mentioned?

Will Howard Dean run on stage and try to gag Sen. Hillary Clinton or at least scream at her and tell her that she's ruining the Democratic party's chance to win the general election?

How many times will Hillary interrupt the moderator in the middle of a new question to further answer the previous question because "I'm sorry, but this is such an important issue"?

How many "personal" stories of random (likely fabricated) Pennsylvanians will be brought up to illustrate how NAFTA or our current health care system has ruined the state?

Will Obama wear a drab powder red tie or a drab powder blue tie?

Who will be mentioned more in the debate: G.W. Bush or John McCain?
— Jeff

By Jeff

I can’t see how the ongoing Clinton/Obama fight won’t hurt whomever (Obama) is the eventual (Obama) nominee.

It’s not like the focus of the discussion has been around tangible issues; it’s been about the Florida/Michigan primary vote validity, Jeremiah Wright, the ridiculous “bitter-gate” (by the way, can we stop adding “-gate” to every controversy, please? It’s been 35 years), and how long it takes Hillary to nurse a shot of Crown.

It’s been so petty and base that it seems like a two-month SNL skit.

The one benefit to the Democrats of this little fifth-grade slapfight, is that it’s fattened their pockets, though only so much of it can be spent on the general election. As of the end of this January, McCain had raised barely $50M compared to Clinton and Obama both raising over $130M. And that gap has only widened in the last two months. A united Republican party can now spend 100% of their efforts to build a warchest against the eventual Democratic nominee, earmarking all of it to the general election fund. This is crucially important to McCain unless he can create a controversy-gate, which forces Obama to return his donations and take public financing.

(continued)

By Jeff

Like much of the rest of America, out of the three remaining candidates, Hillary Clinton is the person I'd least want to be president. Her campaign comprises nearly 100 percent of the people in the country who don't realize this fact.

First, and most broadly — I just loathe her personally. She's just immensely selfish and arrogant; she knows what's best for everyone and will not relent until everyone caves in. Every day she stays in this unwinnable race only makes her look worse in my eyes. When Mitt Romney was in her position, he dropped out and threw all his support behind McCain; taking a back seat in order to help his party. Hillary refuses to do this. She is in full-on attack dog mode, running out Rove-ian tactics like the desperate 3 a.m. ad and the saying that she'd take Obama "at his word" that he's not a Muslim. She is doing everything in her power to make Obama look bad, while letting McCain take a two month nap in advance of the real campaign.

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