January 29, 2020

I don't think this is the way to appeal to Mitt Romney.

#MittOrGetOffThePot is trending on Twitter. He's such a prim man, and you're associating his name with shit.

I think I see what happened...

Jimmy Kimmel made a joke? Oh, no... only in the sense that Jimmy made that joke 8 years ago. See "Jimmy Kimmel Got Through His Correspondent's Dinner Routine Without Dying, But Just Barely" (April 28, 2012, Business Insider):
He made jokes about the Secret Service, Kim Kardashian, Lindsey Lohan, Chris Christie's weight, and how Obama isn't going to win re-election. But they were hardly anything memorable about them.

Some lines just totally bombed, and you could tell Jimmy knew they would, the way he rushed through them.

Directed at Gingrich, "Why are you waiting until Tuesday to drop out. It's time to Mitt or get off the pot."

Groan.
A joke that was notably bad 8 years ago — when the upcoming election was just about whether to keep that nice man Obama or not — has been revived in the context of impeaching that horrible man Trump because we — some of us — are just too distraught to wait a few months for the election.

Maybe Kimmel revived his bad joke last night and got Twitter going down this excrement-laden path.

64 comments:

Mid-Life Lawyer said...

I drove a long time today and listened to some the impeachment proceedings. Jay Sekulow did a great job. I didn't know it was him until he finished and I heard the commentary identifying him. I don't know what to think about Mitt Romney.

rhhardin said...

You can't wait for the election because Trump will just be reelected. Then there's a supreme court problem when RBG leaves.

Wilbur said...

@ Mid-Life Lawyer...

Take it from another mid-life lawyer: there are a lot of people here who will tell you just what to think about Mitt Romney. I will leave it to them.

Wilbur said...

And I agree with you - Sekulow did a great job.

Wilbur said...

When I think of Jimmy Kimmel I think of an excrement-laden path. In my dreams he's face down.

rehajm said...

Would Mitt even see this? If you want to get to Mitt you need to appeal to Pierre Delecto...

tim maguire said...

If the Democrats can’t keep Diane Feinstein on the reservation, then they have bigger problems than Mitt Romney.

we — some of us — are just too distraught to wait a few months for the election.

My real world experience is that there is substance to the Republican claim that impeachment is driven by the fear they can’t beat Trump at the ballot box. It’s My Lai politics—they must destroy democracy in order to save it.

tim in vermont said...

Maybe it’s that shit eating grin of his when he is doing his quisling thing. I guess he figures that with the Mormon vote sewn up, he doesn’t need Republicans to get. re-elected.

tim in vermont said...

By all means put this bastard under oath.

https://nationalfile.com/john-bolton-took-six-figures-from-ukrainian-oligarch-clinton-foundation-donor/

tim in vermont said...

Patrick Howley
@HowleyReporter
John Bolton accepted SIX FIGURES from a Ukrainian oligarch Clinton Foundation donor shortly before he worked in the White House -- and he assured the global Swamp that Trump would not be able to dramatically change foreign policy

Howard said...

Too much blowback for both sides, Auntie. No one really wants witnesses, they just tossing the football around.

Howard said...

No one wants to risk having a loose cannon witness to Mitt the Bed

gilbar said...

Bolton’s unpublished manuscript reportedly accuses Trump of wanting to withhold military aid to Ukraine

What the? THAT BASTARD! What was Trump going do? deny them missiles, and send them Blankets?

Oh, WAIT! that's what the President BEFORE Trump did. I'm confused

Anne in Rockwall, TX said...

I will never understand Mitt Romney. He's got an odd sense of honor.

rhhardin said...

Romney's sense of honor is like McCain's. Self-serving.

tim in vermont said...

'No one wants to risk having a loose cannon witness to Mitt the Bed”

I have been saying all along that this got out of control on day one, and Pelosi got overruled, the inmates have been running the asylum for some time now. Just because witnesses are going to blow up in Democrats’ faces doesn’t mean they aren’t sure to happen.

tim in vermont said...

They do have the networks ready and willing to shut down coverage whenever it is embarrassing to them.

Beasts of England said...

’He's got an odd sense of honor.’

It’s situational...

Ann Althouse said...

The deleted comment and the comments that followed it have all been deleted now. Please raise that subject in the cafe, if you want. I only started the deletion because I was under the impression that the commenter who started it didn't what to be talked about, and then I saw that she didn't mean to delete. At that point it was too late, but really, this is a post on a particular topic and there is an open thread to raise your own topics. I don't want to seem unsympathetic to people who have health issues and those who want to show sympathy, but let's try to keep the conversation on the subject of the post.

Gunner said...

"Mitt, you asshole, get rid of Trump for us, you racist!"

Behold the persuasive vocabulary of SJWs

Expat(ish) said...

@AnnAlthouse - “don’t want to seem unsympathetic “....

I’ve learned a lot working with lawyers over the years, the foremost of which is: read each sentence and word carefully.

And, in shorts, don’t pre-garner your conclusions.

-XC

buwaya said...

Howard is weird. Sometimes he makes perfect sense, as above.
Other times he is perverse.
The man has a personality disorder perhaps.

Anyway, your problems are not simply partisan, but caste/culture/social. Your partisans are at least partly split across the emerging front lines, in their personal interests and culture.

A decadent elite fighting an existential battle against the core of its own volk, everything destabilized by technology. That is a deadly mix.

The American zeitgeist of today is more like this -

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L9VoRmjxvPs

Those in the palaces against those outside the gates.
And behind those mobs was the (relatively) new tech of cheap printing and widespread literacy.

Of course, it isn't so neat as that, and that of 1789 was not neat at all. And, unfortunately, the music will be much worse. No-one like Piaf will sing those songs centuries later.

Laslo Spatula said...

Don Lemon looks at the deplorables with contempt; Romney just sees them with aloof regret.

Extrapolate his decisions from there.

I am Laslo.

buwaya said...

Romney is one of those people who are being split across the modern fault lines.
He had a position in the old way of things. He doesn't now.

I suspect this is also true of the greater Mormon leadership. They are going to have trouble adjusting to the current and future way of things, as I think their own people are moving out from under them.

A great number of people are finding that their old arrangements are becoming obsolete.

Laslo Spatula said...

Romney's business experience was based on his innate belief in himself knowing just the right number of people to lay off.

Deplorables are on the wrong side of the ledger, that's all.

I am Laslo.

rehajm said...

He's got an odd sense of honor.

Yes. In his business personal and political life l think he’s driven by the moral desire to coordinate diverse people and backgrounds but sees Trump as an exclusive agent of division. As a political strategist he’s just bad. He couldn’t win the big race on his own so positions himself as the fallback when Trump implodes. A big miscalculation...so far.

tim in vermont said...

...if I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now, and goes out and IMMEDIATELY writes a nasty & untrue book. All Classified National Security. Who would do this?. @realDonaldTrump just now

He’s not wrong.

rehajm said...

Romney's business experience was based on his innate belief in himself knowing just the right number of people to lay off.

A cute line that’s always good for a rah but it’s wrong.

tim in vermont said...

Howard is weird. Sometimes he makes perfect sense, as above.
Other times he is perverse.


Howard makes sense a lot. He just expresses it in his own way. For instance he is clearly correct that the facts and law of the matter are irrelevant when you have the media on your side and, for instance, can just leak something to the NYT at the perfect moment and make the courts beside the point.

Where he is weak is his lickspittle obeisance before big tech. He is a social Darwinist and thinks that he is onto something scientific or mathematical that can’t be argued with or denied, but, in the immortal words of The Dude: “That’s like, just your opinion man."

tim in vermont said...

"A cute line that’s always good for a rah but it’s wrong.”

How much experience do you have with investment bankers and their consultants? It may be overly simplistic, but it’s not way wrong.

buwaya said...

Romney was not an analyst really.
He was more the man who knew people, and hired the right people.
He was more the "face", in a law firm he would have been a "rainmaker".

We once hired BCG (Boston Consulting, his first employer), in the 90's, and I heard good things about him.

For what its worth, of all the management consulting outfits I have dealt with BCG was the best of a very bad lot.

With Bain he was initially doing straight venture capital. The leveraged buyout stuff began later.

Laslo Spatula said...

"A cute line that’s always good for a rah but it’s wrong."

Bain left a lot of collateral damage in its wake; Romney made his money.

Romney adviser Joseph Cofer Black, joined Burisma’s board of directors while Hunter Biden was also serving on the board.

He made his money.

Rah.

I am Laslo.

tim in vermont said...

The problem with applying investment banking techniques to our nation as a whole is that you can’t simply “lay off” citizens and think they are going to go away. Democrats thought they could lay off the white working class, and that they would never vote Republican “against their interests.” Shore of ditches, bulldozers, and lime, these Americans that people like Romney and Howard think are obsolete, are still going to wake up every morning having been screwed by the deal that the uniparty made, and with their right to vote intact.

The problem with the Democrats trying to use demographic engineering to fix the job, an approach that Romney wholeheartedly endorses. “Bring in scabs!” is that it doesn’t just screw over working class whites, it screws over the Hispanics and Blacks who have always been part of our nation.

Michael K said...

Romney was the manager of decline. That was Bates' model.

Obama was the front man for whatever shadowy figures planned the decline.

Trump is the guy who had to break into the wheelhouse to get the ship started turning around. It will need another figure to keep the turn going after Trump. Rand Paul ? Nikki Haley ? Not Pence. He is weak.

HD 28 may be the signal.


.@GatesforTexas with an insurmountable 59% to 41% lead in the EV in #txlege #HD28. The only doubt remaining is whether Gates' double digit margin of victory starts with a 2 or 1. A bucket of cold water on D hopes of flipping the #TX House in November 2020.https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/480196-can-democrats-flip-the-texas-house-todays-results-will-provide-a-clue …


Hillary won that district in 2016,

Michael K said...

Bain, not Bates.

tim in vermont said...

A problem is that there is an ocean of money and no shortage of gullible investors who look at even profitable companies like lottery tickets and come in and apply rules that may work in the aggregate, but may or may not apply to the company in question, figuring that the percentages are in their favor. If your company doesn't fit their “one size fits all” approach, well too bad for you, it’s your fault for devoting your time and energy to that company, loser.

buwaya said...

I saw the "tech" thing from the inside, so to speak, in its great days of the 80's - 90's in Silicon Valley. I was there, if in a peripheral capacity, as, mainly, a buyer of tech, an evaluator of tech, to apply to our clients operational problems.

That was when the churn was furious and the rate of change was extreme. A year was forever.

Its not at all like that now.

tim in vermont said...

I would vote for Rand Paul in heartbeat. Trump has moved him inside the Overton Window.

Kevin said...

Cue the Hitler in the bunker scene where Herr Romney learns voting for witnesses won’t make him more popular.

Laslo Spatula said...

I will add another oversimplification:

Trump built things.

Romney unbuilt things.

The differences matter the more deplorable you are.

I am Laslo.

tim in vermont said...

I think that the witness thing is going to blow up in Democrats’ face. What the Democrats wanted was to be able to demand witnesses and to not get them and yell “Cover up!” Well I have my own cry: "Moar popcorn!"

tim in vermont said...

Investment banking = casino capitalism. Deplorables are just chips, and they fall where they may.

Larry J said...

He's such a prim man, and you're associating his name with shit.

Actually, Romney is doing that all on his own.

Laslo Spatula said...

We had decades of the Romneys and Ryans and Kristols explaining what was in our best interest.

The Trump Presidency has been three years of Donald saying to them "Hold my beer."

Fuck Romney and the others. Fuck them with Kimmel's dick.

I am Laslo.

Laslo Spatula said...

If you can't use Occam's Razor to slash some tires, what's the point in having a razor?

I am Laslo.

Laslo Spatula said...

Romney wants to be invited to the Elite's Bukkake Party, then will tell the dry cleaners afterward that it was only 'friendly fire'.

He wouldn't know what they really thought of him until it hit him in the face, as it were.

I am Laslo.

hombre said...

Romney hasn't figured out that this McCain routine doesn’t make him look principled and righteous. To Democrats he is a useful idiot. To others he looks vindictive, stupid or seditious, or all three.

Outside the domain of political BS, there is no case against Trump and a strong case against the Bidens. If Romney breaks ranks with Republicans on any of these votes, that will be his legacy just as McCain’s treacherous vote on Obamacare is his.

rehajm said...

Romney was the manager of decline.

When Romney was at Bain he was with the group that was investing mostly in troubled early stage firms with capital or business model problems. They weren’t big bloated mature companies with layers of employees ripe for downsizing. They actually made very few layoffs and those they did were of last resort.

Michael K said...


That was when the churn was furious and the rate of change was extreme. A year was forever.

Its not at all like that now.


It's Theranos now.

Wince said...

Senator Brylcreem: A little stab will do ya'.

tim in vermont said...

"They actually made very few layoffs and those they did were of last resort.”

I heard a story that was first hand from a guy who ran a factory that was bought by VCs. He was told to lay off a group of employees that he thought was crucial, because ten times their salary would go right to the bottom line of the deal they wanted to make. The guy hadn’t gotten rid of them before because he considered them essential to the long term health of the business, and I won’t go into it, but he made a very good case. Basically they were tarting up the books short term for the sale.

tim in vermont said...

But it’s nice to see that Romney’s mother posts here.

tim in vermont said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
tim in vermont said...

Manchin says call Hunter

https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1222518224744538115

rehajm said...

I heard a story that was first hand from a guy...

Gee that’s some appeal to authority. I guess that guy that knows that guy can speak for everyone...

If it’s so easy to make a fortune buying companies and laying off the employees why isn’t everyone doing it? Why aren’t you doing it? Because you hold yourself to a higher moral standard than one of the heads of the Mormon church? Give it a rest...

I know you won’t but take thirty seconds and go to the Bain wiki page to see the list of all the companies they bought up, laid off all the staff and pocketed a mint. It’s a long list...

rehajm said...

Oh and I’m not his mother but I think my wife spent several hours on the phone with Mitt helping get her finances im order back in the day...

Laslo Spatula said...

"I know you won’t but take thirty seconds and go to the Bain wiki page to see the list of all the companies they bought up, laid off all the staff and pocketed a mint. It’s a long list..."

The Wiki page of Bain in the 90s shows they made a lot of money on several successes. And that a lot of those companies subsequently went bankrupt. With layoffs in-between to try to keep up profits.

Romney WAS talented. He got it in, kept the shell games going, got paid, then got out before the collapses.

I hope Kimmel is kind enough to give him a pillow to bite on when the inevitable ass-fucking comes.

I am Laslo.

Marc in Eugene said...

And, unfortunately, the music will be much worse. No-one like Piaf will sing those songs centuries later.

Who is Billie Eilish? Oh, there is an Eilish post.

Birkel said...

The nice made who sent the IRS after American citizens? Who spies on journalists? Who jailed journalists? Who spies on politicians from the competing political party? The nice man who released sealed divorce records of his opponents - twice!!

Pass to the left hand side.

Seeing Red said...

It’s the Schitt Sho. We’re up Schitt’s Creek.

I’m not surprised.

It’s poop everywhere. Especially in San Franshitco.

tim in vermont said...

"Because you hold yourself to a higher moral standard than one of the heads of the Mormon church? “

Ha ha ha ha ha ha! I am not giving names here. You can believe it or don’t. I think I put enough detail in there that anybody with any idea of what they are talking about can judge for themselves. But your Morman Church line is hysterical.

Jim at said...

At one point, Jimmy Kimmel was funny.
That ship sailed long ago.

tim in vermont said...

Romney’s questions aren’t as bad as I thought, but he does frame them from Democrat spin.

https://twitter.com/SenatorRomney/status/1222591787300245514

tim in vermont said...

Mountain Meadows. Were any leaders of the Mormon Church involved in that?