Hillary before the Benghazi committee is "going to be less a showdown than a show trial. The verdict is already in. The Republicans are guilty."

"It’s not that Hillary has gotten so much more trustable. It’s just that the Republicans are so much less credible."

Maureen Dowd conveys the talking point. Whatever Hillary is, look at the Republicans: They're worse.

Dowd's NYT readers, it should be noted, tend to think she's not pro-Hillary enough. A top-rated comment is:

Typical Doud [sic] performance. Dismiss the comm for the farce that it is, but attack Clinton anyway and keep the nonsense and lies about Benghazi and emails going. It doesn't matter that other secretaries of State had their own private email servers? It only matters that Clinton had one? Doesn't matter that the messages she is said to have sent or received were not classified at the time? Doesn't matter that no one, NO ONE, has discovered any email sent or received over this private server that went astray or would have made the slightest difference if it had? At least Doud understands the basic political purpose of the comm and its "investigation" -- get Clinton. Too bad she can't recognize that she does the same thing, repeatedly.

"Do you still see a dark vein of intolerance inside the Republican party today?" Chuck Todd asked Colin Powell...

... on "Meet the Press" yesterday. Without any hesitation, Powell said "Yes":

Yes. And people have said, "Why are you calling us racists?" I say, "No, I'm not calling the party racist. I'm just saying, if you look at it, you will see that there's some in the party who practice a level of intolerance that is not good for the party and is not consistent with American values."

The ancient mating habits of whatever.

"Of course I want research, but I want to have research done in a way that focuses on growing our economy, not on ancient mating habits of whatever."

I want to do research into the psychology of Democrats slavering for a tidbit of Republican Saying Something Stupid.

"This may be the worst race-baiting campaign ad since Willie Horton."

Says Salon's Luke Brinker about this new ad from the National Republican Campaign Committee:



Here's the famous Willie Horton ad for comparison:



Here's a New Yorker article from 2 years ago about Larry McCarthy, the man who created the Willie Horton ad. Excerpt:

McCarthy knew that showing Horton’s menacing face would make voters feel viscerally that Dukakis was soft on crime. Critics said that the ad stoked racial fears, presenting a little-known black man as an icon of American violence....

McCarthy has rarely spoken publicly about the ad. But in a sworn deposition, given in 1991 to the Federal Election Commission, he theorized that there were two subjects guaranteed to move voters: the economy and crime. “People, they take crime real seriously,” he explained. He later told a reporter that when he first saw Horton’s mug shot he said to himself, “God, this guy’s ugly.” He added, “This is every suburban mother’s greatest fear.”....

According to Floyd Brown, the conservative operative who hired McCarthy in 1988, the Horton ad “was incredibly effective.” Brown maintains that Dukakis’s lead over George H. W. Bush collapsed after the ad began airing. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster and strategist who also worked on the Horton ad, argues that McCarthy was relatively restrained — there were no photographs of Horton’s victims, for example. And Brown says that the ad became a scapegoat after Dukakis lost. Both men use the word “brilliant” to describe McCarthy. “Larry is not just one of the best ad-makers these days,” Brown says. “He’s one of the best advertising minds this century. You go into a studio with Larry, and you’re watching art. It’s beautiful.”

The NYT poll reports terrible numbers for Democrats, but calls the Republican Party "deeply unpopular."

Check out all the numbers and consider the wording of the intro to the poll:

A New York Times/CBS News poll shows that President Obama’s approval ratings are similar to those of President George W. Bush in 2006 when Democrats swept both houses of Congress in the midterm elections.

A deeply unpopular Republican Party is nonetheless gaining strength heading into the midterms, as the American public’s frustration with Mr. Obama has manifested itself in low ratings for his handling of foreign policy and terrorism.

I'm thinking that the NYT loathes the GOP so much — the GOP is "deeply unpopular" at the NYT — that even when the poll numbers show the unpopularity of the Democratic Party, it feels compelled to say that the GOP is deeply unpopular, even though saying that raises the inference that the Democratic Party must be really unpopular to be more unpopular than the deeply unpopular GOP. And yet there's still some hope that the unpopularity of the Democratic Party is, perhaps, not deep.

Maybe the unpopularity of the Democratic Party is a transitory surface phenomenon, like some very itchy rash, while the unpopularity of the Republicans is more like arthritis, bad, but this rampant rash is driving us crazy, so if you ask us right now what's bothering us, it's that damned rash, but the rash will clear up and the arthritis will never go away.

"The GOP legislation, which was rewritten twice to attract support, had trouble getting off the ground..."

"... and if the House doesn’t vote, lawmakers will head back to their districts to hear from voters with a crisis raging at the border."

The turmoil is stunning considering how far to the right the GOP leadership pulled this bill. Boehner, McCarthy and Scalise, the new GOP whip, crafted a process that would have given the House a vote on legislation to stop the Obama administration from expanding its deferred deportation program. But even that wasn’t enough....

"Men do tend to talk about things on a much higher level."

"Many of my male colleagues, when they go to the House floor, you know, they’ve got some pie chart or graph behind them and they’re talking about trillions of dollars and how, you know, the debt is awful and, you know, we all agree with that... we need our male colleagues to understand that if you can bring it down to a woman's level and what everything that she is balancing in her life — that’s the way to go."

"Sometimes, a Jewish person just wants to be able to go to Congress and speak with a Jewish person..."

"And Chuck Schumer is not it for us," said a Jewish person the NYT found in the hotel lobby after a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, quoted in "Republican Jews Alarmed at the Prospect of a Void in the House and Senate."

"Is Paul Ryan Breaking Up With His Wonk Buddies?"

"The coming fight among conservative intellectuals."

How the Democratic Party is leveraging Eric Cantor's loss: "This guy isn't extreme enough for the GOP... the Tea Party is now in charge."

That arrived in the email a couple hours ago, from the Democratic Party. At the linked website, the line is: "Tea Party Republicans have taken over the GOP — and they'll stop at nothing to win complete control of Congress. You don't want to imagine what a Congress run entirely by the Tea Party would look like."

"[I]t’s not easy to box Brat into a neat caricature of an anti-immigration zealot or Tea Party demagogue, or, in Time’s hasty reporting, a 'shopworn conservative boilerplate.'"

"If Brat ascends to Congress, which is quite likely given the Republican-leaning district that he’ll run in as the GOP nominee, he may actually continue taking on powerful elites in Washington."

Writes Lee Fang at The Nation.

"In 3 states Tuesday night, long-serving lawmakers rolled over tea party opponents."

"Eight-term Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson beat back a challenger supported by Club for Growth, the most influential conservative group targeting elected officials in primaries. In Pennsylvania, Rep. Bill Shuster easily dispatched an opponent once touted as a tea party warrior."

Overshadowing the whole night was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decisive triumph over Matt Bevin, a conservative Louisville investor whose bid drew support from outside groups such as the Senate Conservatives Fund and FreedomWorks. Bevin proved entirely unequal to the task of fighting McConnell and saw his public image shredded as McConnell’s campaign picked apart his record on issues from bank bailouts to cockfighting.

 AND: Chelsea Clinton's mother-in-law fails in her effort to get back to Congress, despite help from Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Should the GOP run Rick Perry against Hillary Clinton?

Dick Morris explains a key difference between the tastes of Republicans and Democrats:

Of the last eight people who have won the Republican nomination for president, six ran for the office and lost before they eventually got their party’s designation. To win as a Republican, it would seem you have to first go through losing.

Romney, McCain, Dole, Bush-41, Reagan, and Nixon all lost before they won. Only Bush-43 and Ford won without first losing. (And Ford inherited the nomination and almost blew it).

Not so in the Democratic Party. Of the last seven nominees, only Al Gore first lost before he eventually got the nomination 12 years later.

That's about getting the nomination, not winning the election. The GOP's last winner — who won twice — was the one who hadn't tried for the nomination before. It seems to me the GOP has terrible luck with its propensity to go back to the old loser who seems to have waited his turn.

Republicans don’t like to take chances. They want their candidates to have served their apprenticeship as losers. The Republican voters are agoraphobic, fearful of new situations and people. It takes them a while to get used to new candidates and those who have run once and learned their lessons have great appeal. So keep your eye on Perry.

Because he just might win the nomination and proceed to lose the election? Anyway, buried in that column — if you care about the thoughts of (speaking of old losers) Dick Morris — is some pushing of Scott Walker:

Walker... is interesting because he has been, hands down, the best Republican governor in recent years. He slew the teachers union, freed the schools, funded education, cut taxes, created jobs, and survived repeated political assassination attempts. He has the courage, fiber and vision it would take. 

And you know how much Republicans need fiber. 

Obama says the Republican Party, on Obamacare, "has gone through the stages of grief — anger and denial and all that stuff."

I transcribed that from the press conference that's going on right now. He's answering a question about whether there could be some legislative amendments to the Affordable Care Act, to deal with some flaws, and he's saying that nothing can be done until Republicans change their attitude. They need to get through their "stages of grief" "stuff." Why the Kübler-Ross model? It's that meme that the Republicans are dying! They need to deal with their death, eh?!

Well, the first stage, which Obama put second of the 2 stages he bothered to enumerate before resorting to "all that stuff," is denial, and of course, the Republicans are going to deny that they are dying. As for anger, that's stage 2, and why shouldn't a political party get angry over its setbacks and want to fight for what it believes? Obviously, in life, when we are actually dying, getting angry is a stage, because anger isn't going to conquer death. But this is politics, not dying, and plainly the fire will rage on.

The stages Obama failed to enumerate are: 3. bargaining, 4. depression, and 5. acceptance. Maybe he didn't want to say bargaining, because he doesn't want his party to have to bargain with the other side. He just wants the GOP to get over it. The analogy to dying is, once again, terrible. Because in the stages of death scenario, the dying person seeks to avert death by somehow finding a way to make a deal, perhaps with God. Obama doesn't want to talk about deal-making. He wants the Republicans to give up and die already.

As for depression, I guess he's hoping the GOP will reach that point, but that's unlikely in this election year, and clearly he knows it. Ditto acceptance. But let's not talk about "all that stuff."

By the way, the Kübler-Ross model isn't too scientific. And to tell someone who's angry and unaccepting of a political situation that they should go away until they've accepted what is being done to them sounds to me like taunting and bullying. There's absolutely no reason why they should back down because some of their emotions correspond to Kübler-Ross's (bogus) stages. You're saying if someone doesn't believe that a political cause is dying or feels angry at the idea that it's dying, all you need to do is wait out the process, because bargaining and depression need to occur and then you win because finally there will be acceptance. Infuriating nonsense! It only intensifies and justifies the anger. Your opponents aren't just going through a "stage," and you sound inert and supercilious talking about them that way.

"I think that the Republican Party, in order to get bigger, will have to agree to disagree on social issues."

"The Republican Party is not going to give up on having quite a few people who do believe in traditional marriage. But the Republican Party also has to find a place for young people and others who don’t want to be festooned by those issues."

Said Rand Paul.

At the Gridiron Dinner — a congregation of elite journalists and politicians — "Chris Cristie’s recent 'Bridge-gate' scandal got laughs."

WaPo reports:

Sung to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Feelin’ Groovy,” they lyrics, “Hello, Fort Lee/ How’s it flowing? /I’ve come to watch your gridlock growing,” were made particularly funny by use of sight gags — new Gridiron members Bret Baier of Fox News and NBC News Washington bureau chief Ken Strickland appeared onstage sporting an elaborate getup as the George Washington Bridge.

Also, John Kerry made the joke about Charlie Crist: "we Vietnam vets just call you ‘Agent Orange.’” Get it? It might be because he's from Florida, and oranges are one thing you associate with Florida, but WaPo informs us that orange must refer to his perennial tan. As for "Agent Orange" and the connection to Vietnam vets, WaPo says nothing, so here, I found this on Vietnam:

What's with all the doctors running for Congress?

"Where do we get this idea that a background in medicine is particularly apt for lawmakers?" I asked on this blog 2 weeks ago.

What is going on with this promotion of doctors in the American political scene? There's something odd and excessive about our respect for them. We must trust and depend on them when we have medical problems, but why are we bent on installing them in political office? Let's think more carefully about the sort of minds that go into medicine and whether we are not overvaluing them as political candidates.

Now, the NYT is looking into the doctors-and-Congress phenomenon:

With a few exceptions, these physician legislators and candidates — there are three dozen of them — are much alike: deeply conservative, mostly male, and practicing in the specialty fields in which costs and pay have soared in recent years...

The Times quotes 2 members of Congress who are doctors, one a Republican and one a Democrat. The Republican, Tom Coburn, a family doctor, says doctors are "frustrated" over changes in the practice of medicine. The Democrat, Jim McDermott, a psychiatrist, looks into the psyche of doctors and says: "They want to have their hands right there on the handle so they can pull it one way or another."

As for the reason so few of them are liberal... [McDermott] said he believed that politically conservative physicians were more likely to chafe at the direction of changes in health care, with greater oversight by the government and a more regulated role for the private sector.

That undercuts McDermott's need-to-control analysis. He's implying that liberal physicians are the ones who accept government control. I can see how to harmonize McDermott's 2 statements. The Congress has already pulled the handle very far in the liberal direction, so the liberal doctor doesn't need to go to Congress to pull the handle back the other way. The liberal doctor is accepting if things as they are because that's what he likes, and he appreciates the way Congress has been pulling the handle. (Or as Bob Dylan once sang: "The vandals took the handles.")

By the way, when a psychiatrist talks about pulling the handle, one simply must cry phallic symbol, and don't tell me sometimes a handle is just a handle. McDermott's handle was always a metaphor, and the image of Congress as a place where a lot of guys get their hands right there on the handle so they can pull it is just too rich to ignore. From the 3rd variation on the top-voted meaning of "circle jerk" at Urban Dictionary:

When a bunch of blowhards - usually politicians - get together for a debate but usually end up agreeing with each other's viewpoints to the point of redundancy, stroking each other's egos as if they were extensions of their genitals (ergo, the mastubatory insinuation). Basically, it's what happens when the choir preaches to itself.

Okay. Let's get on back on the pavement, thinking about the government. The NYT article under consideration here indicates that the GOP is recruiting physicians to run for office and there's something about doctors — at least the ones who say yes — that responds to the call:

“When you’re a Type A surgeon, as I am, one thing leads to another,” said Representative Tom Price, a Georgia Republican who is an orthopedic surgeon. “The next thing you know, somebody is asking you to run for office.”

Mixing up the medicine... with politics.

"Republican wins San Diego mayor special election. And in spite of a flood of public-union money in favor of the Democrat."

"Obama Turnout Machine Crashes in San Diego — Loses Mayor’s Race by 9 Points."

The polls were skin-tight leading into yesterday’s election, and unions poured in millions to keep control in the nation’s eighth-largest city. . . . Democrats were stunned at the margin.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said:

What justifies the "in spite" in the article? Pension and medical benefits of public employees are a hot issue. The more a Dem candidate looks like a union stooge, the worse it is for that candidate.

I think what we are seeing — and what we saw here in Wisconsin in 2011 — is a new visibility to the dysfunctional cycling of money between the public employee unions and the Democratic Party.

"Over the past five decades, the Out Party has tried solos, duos, men, women, men and women, press conferences, films and telethons..."

"... in generally unsuccessful attempts to match the presidential pageantry. The Republicans had 17 responders in 1968; the Democrats used to trot out 10 or 12 at a time in an attempt to match Reagan’s star power during the early 1980s."

Writes political biographer John Aloysius Farrell in a piece titled "The State of the Union Curse/Why responding to the president can be hazardous to your political career."

Do you even know who's doing the SOTU response this year?

It's Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Do you even know who she is? Do you think her diminuitiveness is appropriately augmented by having a second responder? That's what they're doing, those brilliant Republicans, who no, no, no are not having a war on women. There's a second SOTU response, from Senator Mike Lee — ostensibly on the theory that the Tea Party should have its own voice.

I sure hope America gets that, as opposed to thinking: Oh, there are the Republicans for you. They show you they actually have a woman, but then they bring out their real person, the pasty old white guy.

Don't tell me it would be wrong for people to take that message. The whole point of the SOTU response is messaging. Whatever message is received is the message. I'm tired of the explanations for all the poorly delivered messages from Republicans. They've got to improve their messaging.

Here's a big clue for you all: Don't Disrespect The Woman.

"The wife is to voluntarily submit, just as the husband is to lovingly lead and sacrifice."

"The husband's part is to show up during the times of deep stress, take the leadership role and be accountable for the outcome, blaming no one else."

IN THE COMMENTS: Dr Weevil said (and Instapundit quoted this):

This couple could very easily get all the lefties to stop criticizing and even to admire them. All they have to do is keep the Biblical quotations to themselves and just tell people they're really into BDSM, she's the M and he's the S, she really likes to be disciplined, he really enjoys disciplining her, and who are you to judge? They can be totally traditional in the privacy of their own home and totally transgressive in public. Win-win!

Now, that's funny — and Instapundit twists the humor by saying if the public display of religion were Muslim (rather than Christian), the lefties would refrain from criticizing. I see the humor, but I'm going to take the underlying concepts seriously.

1. Are the lefties criticizing? The linked article is the lefty (politely lefty) website Talking Points Memo (which links to a WaPo article). I see "This post has been updated," so maybe it was nastier before, but I see a pretty neutral account of the beliefs of Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM), with verbatim quotes from his memoir and from his spokesman who says that The Washington Post misread the book, which in fact shows that "Pearce believes the phrase 'submission' is widely misunderstood in society and criticizes those who distort the bible to justify male dominance." TPM quotes a passage of the book that the spokesperson said shows what Pearce really thinks:

"I reasoned that surely Jesus did not in any way teach the idea of a chauvinistic male-centered marriage.... We are all created in God’s image, I reasoned, so it could not be that the man is in some way superior or the wife inferior."

That's TPM, and that post was updated, so maybe there are lefties somewhere criticizing, but if that's the way you think, aren't you displaying the very close-mindedness of which you'd like to accuse those terrible lefties?

Here's the underlying WaPo piece, which has an update appended to the text of its original article. WaPo quotes the Bible passage ("the book of Ephesians says wives should 'submit to their husbands in everything'"), recounts the Pearce's struggle to make sense of it, rather than to ignore it as "[m]any of their friends" did, and quotes Pearce's opinion that it is not a basis for husbands to "bully their wives and families" or to claim "authoritarian control."

WaPo notes that "Democrats in recent years have repeatedly attacked Republicans for their views on and comments about women's issues," and that "Since that election, GOP leaders have sought to coach their members on how to be more sensitive when talking about women's issues." That is, WaPo refers to the potential for Pearce's words to be used against him, the propensity of Democrats to do exactly that, and the way GOP leaders worry about candidates that give Democrats any raw material. That's pretty damned balanced. I guess you can say that WaPo made the Democrats look like lefties who pounce on anything to push the old war-on-women theme, but let some Democrats step forward then and trash Pearce for reading the Bible and trying to understand it in the context of a loving, equality-minded couple. What Pearce is saying is the typical stuff of modern American church sermons, and liberals have heard and absorbed these sermons too.

2. Sexual behavior of the domination-and-submission variety has to do with individuals discovering what amuses them on a purely physical level. I don't see anyone of any prominence in America recommending submissive sexuality as a matter of principle or as something to be imposed on women who don't independently and enthusiastically enjoy it. Quite the opposite. I see some men wanting the submissive role. And some women needing encouragement — because it seems politically incorrect — to go ahead and enjoy submission if that's what they find sexually exciting. But I'm not seeing any conspicuous talk of imposing sexual submission on nonvolunteers. That behavior occurs, and when it does, in this country, we call it a crime. When's the last time you heard an American take the position that within a marriage rape is impossible?

3. What's "totally traditional" is to put devotion to religion above one's immediate sexual pleasures. If you go public flaunting your enjoyment of domination and submission, you're conveying a message that is completely the opposite of what is traditional and that has no power to persuade others to do anything because of religion or because of tradition. Your only message is: Whatever turns you on. 

Now, it might turn you on to pretend to believe that God requires you to submit to your sexual partner. And in traditional societies where people believe God requires submission, women may adapt by eroticizing subordination. But what religion gives you extra credit for finding the fulfillment of sexual requirements sexy?

The answer to that question is actually not obvious, and feel free — it's a free country — to explore the nuance. I can imagine some proponents of religion saying that the true believer, doing anything God requires, feels free and joyful. God may seem to be saying what old-school parents say to children: You're going to do it and you're going to like it. As they say in The Book of Common Prayer: "O God... whose service is perfect freedom...."

ADDED: I started a new thread for commenting all the added material.