I haven't used my tag "the stupid party" in a while, but I'm thinking about it this morning...

... as I scan the bloggable headlines at Memeorandum.

Both parties compete for the designation, though they insist the other party deserves the title.

Right now, the Republicans are making a big play for the anti-honor. Must I copy and paste the headlines that have caused me to write this post?

"The Democrats lost an election they never expected to lose. They... lost to a reality TV show host when Hillary Clinton had all the backing of the establishment in the world."

"And instead of asking, what is it about our ideology that ruled the country for eight years, that drove people away from us into Donald Trump's arms, they instead decided they were going to blame everybody else. The Democrats simply replaced Trump with the same ideology they governed with for 8 years under Obama that caused people to run away from them as fast as they could. And now that people are doing that again, instead of asking ‘why is that happening’ they're getting poised to blame the electorate for being stupid -- for thinking the economy's bad when it's actually good." 

Said Glenn Greenwald, quoted at Real Clear Politics.

I remember when the incumbent President lost to a Democrat who said "It's the economy, stupid."

Now, apparently, the message is: If you think it's the economy, you're stupid.

By the way, who was getting called stupid in the 1992 Clinton slogan "It's the economy, stupid"?

It is often quoted from a televised quip by [Bill Clinton's strategist James] Carville as "It’s the economy, stupid."... His phrase was directed at the campaign's workers and intended as one of three messages for them to focus on. The others were "Change vs. more of the same" and "Don't forget health care."

Was he calling the campaign workers "stupid"? It seems as though he was compelling them to focus on the economy by internalizing the taunt "Stupid!" — to be triggered if they ever stray into any other topic. It might have been heard as an insult to the President George H.W. Bush. He's so out of touch, he doesn't know the people are hurting. He's stupid. It can't be that they were calling us, the People, stupid. That wouldn't work. 

Anyway, right now, the Democrats aren't blatantly labeling us stupid. That's Greenwald's rhetoric. He's saying the Democrats are telling the People they are stupid if they think the economy is bad. So, I would add, that means the Democrats are taking the George H.W. Bush position and are vulnerable to the attack that brought down Bush: "It's the economy, stupid." 

***

In giving this post my "stupid" tag, I see an old tag I'd forgotten about: "the stupid party." I need to publish this post so I can click on it to refresh my memory of what that was about. I think it has to do with the way each party characterizes the other as the "stupid" one. Or maybe it was about how the 2 parties vie for the honor of being the "stupid" one.

If he's American, why are you calling him "an Asian man."

You know, it's so dumb to accuse Trump of political crimes like this and to fail to make sure you're not committing the same damned crime you want us to be so outraged about it. The genius here is Greg Sargent at WaPo:

President Trump’s new campaign ad attacking Joe Biden as soft on China and coronavirus is drawing attention for its ugly xenophobia. As many have noted, in order to portray Biden as weak and overly deferential toward China — and, by extension, toward coronavirus — the ad shows Biden bowing to an Asian man with Chinese flags in the background.

The man turns out to be American.

Asian man!! He's American!

I've already talked about that ad — here, in a post that went up at 6:00 a.m. — so I'm not going into any more detail. I just wanted to laugh at Greg Sargent.

"But if the anti-Trump movement has a crippling defect, it’s smugness, and Wolff’s book reflects and richly feeds it."

"We’re the moral scolds who struggle to acknowledge the skeletons in our own closet, the smart people whose forecasts keep proving wrong. We said Trump couldn’t win. That the stock market would never recover from his election. That he would blow up NATO. That the Middle East would erupt in violence when Jerusalem was recognized as Israel’s capital... [B]y constantly predicting doom and painting the White House in the darkest colors, anti-Trumpers have only helped the president. We have set an almost impossibly high bar for Trumpian failure... ) We have increased the country’s tolerance for the president’s venial sins. And we have turned the 'Resistance' into a byword for the hysterical and condescending ninnies of American politics."

Writes Bret Stephens in the NYT, and all I can say is if you and your cohort are so sure you're the smart ones, why wasn't all of this obvious to you all along? Or is this remedial reading for NYT subscribers, who are just now beginning to get it?

For the annals of bad right-wing jokes.

"I wouldn’t want to lose my mammograms."

People who obviously don't listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Catching up on Facebook, I ran into an article titled "Stop Calling People 'Low Information Voters" (by Claire Lehmann):

A pernicious term used for those who voted for Trump and Brexit is the “low information voter”....

In the Washington Post, the low information voter is defined as one who is more likely to respond to emotional appeals about issues such as the economy, immigration, Muslims, race relations and sexism. The Post goes onto [sic] explain:

Low information voters are those who do not know certain basic facts about government and lack what psychologists call a “need for cognition.” Those with a high need for cognition have a positive attitude toward tasks that require reasoning and effortful thinking and are, therefore, more likely to invest the time and resources to do so when evaluating complex issues.

In other words, low information people react quickly, trust their intuitions and shirk deliberative thought. High information people take the time to think things through....

The WaPo piece — written by 2 polisci profs — was published the day before the election, so it's kind of funny to read it now that the belief that Trump was about to go down is shattered by reality (speaking of information). The Lehmann article just came out yesterday. It's an interesting article. Worth reading:

This is one reason why charges of wholesale ignorance are so obtuse. “High information” people ignore evidence if it conflicts with their preferred narrative all the time. And while it may be naïve for voters to believe the promises of Trump and the Brexit campaigners — it has also been profoundly naïve for the cosmopolitan classes to believe that years of forced internationalism and forced political correctness were never going to end with a large scale backlash.

But what strikes me is that these people are exposing their complete lack of familiarity with Rush Limbaugh's powerfully influential radio show. Rush has been using the term "low-information voters" for years and years to refer to the people who are accepting the view of the world presented in the mainstream media (which he sees as thoroughly biased in the liberal direction).  If you're not up on Rush Limbaugh, but you're writing about American politics, then you yourself are low-information.

UPDATE, the next day: Rush Limbaugh talks about this post on his show, and I respond to that here.

Is playing dumb — pretending not to understand what Trump means — a good tactic?

I'm really tired of it, but then I pay excessive attention to the jabber of the day. I find it hard to bother to talk about Trump's saying Obama is "the founder of ISIS" and Hillary Clinton is "the co-founder." Really, does anyone want to own up to being so deficient in language skill that they don't get it? Apparently they do. Here's Allegra Kirkland at Talking Points Memo: "Trump Now Says Claim That Obama Was ‘Founder Of ISIS’ Was ‘Sarcasm.'"

I remember when liberals liked to present themselves as the smart people. But these are not normal times.

OH: Are these times when I must say that my "these are not normal times" is sarcasm?

ADDED: I think Trump's comment is easily understood, so the tactic of focusing on it gets it more widely heard and contemplated.

Does anyone think Trump is actually confused and just getting something wrong? He's making an attack and getting it spread virally. It's memorable and (darkly) funny. I could see thinking that a President shouldn't indulge in figures of speech that can be misunderstood, but the current criticism is mostly trying to deprive Trump of the power to say things in a vivid, effective way. Trump knows that, as his dialogue with Hugh Hewitt shows:

DT: No, it’s no mistake. Everyone’s liking it. I think they’re liking it.... do you not like that?

HH: I don’t. I think I would say they created, they lost the peace. They created the Libyan vacuum, they created the vacuum into which ISIS came, but they didn’t create ISIS. That’s what I would say.

DT: Well, I disagree.... I mean, with his bad policies, that’s why ISIS came about.... If he would have done things properly, you wouldn’t have had ISIS.... Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS.

HH: And that’s, I’d just use different language to communicate it...

DT: But they wouldn’t talk about your language, and they do talk about my language, right?

Yes, they do, so it's effective... until it's not effective. And that's what Trump's antagonists would like to take away from  him. They would like us to hear his speech as evidence that this man is mentally unbalanced. That is, they want to unbalance our minds, so we no longer hear him and understand but hear him and are triggered to think he's mentally unbalanced. 

30% or Republicans and 19% of Democrats said they supported the bombing of Agrabah — which is the fictional place in the cartoon movie "Aladdin."

A new Public Policy Poll revealed.

This isn't a basis for saying Republicans are stupider, except to the extent that it's stupid to be enthusiastic about bombing the enemy and trust that polling firms are asking questions about what they seem to be asking.

Now, the smart answer is to decline to answer either yes or no. You don't need to know the name is from a fictional movie. It's enough to recognize that you don't know Agrabah. The yes + no total for Democrats is 55. For Republicans it's 43.

If Obama gets serious about the war against ISIS... what does that do to campaign politics?

I'm reading this in The Washington Post:

American-led airstrikes killed at least 180 Islamic State fighters as local Kurdish forces­ scrambled to repel a bold, multi-pronged assault by the militants, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Thursday.... The fighting in northern Iraq comes as President Obama struggles to defend his policy — called feeble by some critics in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. — and his handling of the war in Syria, where Russia’s new air campaign has added to the complexity of an already tangled conflict.

I have no idea what Obama should or will do in Iraq in the next 11 months. I just want to observe that he's in a position to manipulate presidential politics. Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that he would be willing to corrupt his military decisionmaking with calculations about what will help his party in the 2016 election.

And resist the sarcastic commentary on the assumption. Everyone can see that side road. Don't waste your time going over there. The scenic road is up ahead: Could Obama undercut the GOP candidates (some/all of them) by going big in an effort to defeat ISIS? Ted Cruz has said he wants to "carpet bomb" and Donald Trump has said he would "bomb the shit out of them." What if Obama beats them to it? Who benefits?

Help me puzzle through this. I'm thinking: First, Hillary needs to get the nomination. That must be locked in, but after that, Hillary is free to be the hawk that is one of her multiple personas. She can play that well, I think. But she'll lose some Democrats. Sanders could become a third party candidate. He only recently joined the Democratic Party, and he's already the candidate of the Working Families Party. There's some risk, but the GOP candidates will lose some of their foundation if Obama shifts into warrior mode.

What if it becomes an argument about who can best continue Obama's vigorous, popular war on ISIS? Republicans can talk about how Obama squandered what had been a Bush victory in Iraq and allowed ISIS to flourish and force us into this new war, and so a GOP President is more trustworthy. But which GOP candidate will be the one making this argument? Hillary will argue for continuity and Obama-style smartness, as opposed to the carpet-and-shit bombing from The Stupid Party.

There are many unmentioned permutations. I'm trying to start a discussion. The topic is: How can Obama stymie the Trump-and-Cruz Party by going big against ISIS?

"I hear the only person beating me in Iowa is Scott Walker. I can’t believe I’m in second place. Folks, will you please put me in first place so I feel better?"

Said Donald Trump, as if he were running for President simply for the feelings that swell within him. Trump is attacking Walker now. He's saying that Wisconsin is "in turmoil" and "a disaster." To be fair, Trump is lashing out after Walker's campaign sent out an email that said Trump's other name was "DumbDumb" (which really is lame — name calling? I thought Walker was above that).

Trump told the crowd Saturday that he had helped Walker win his race because he admired the candidate’s “fight,” but didn’t know what he was fighting for. “I’ve been very nice to him,” he said.

But after Walker’s fundraising email went public, Trump declared: “I can finally attack.”

So you see the message here: Don't attack Trump or he will target you. It would be foolish to stand down because of that threat, but it's also foolish to attack Trump in Trumpish terms (like calling him "DumbDumb").

“A guy like Bush, a guy like Walker, are controlled by the people who give them money,” Trump said. “They will be bombarded by their lobbyists who donated a lot.... The other guys running, the Republicans — they protect each other," Trump said early in his speech. “Me, I don't care.”

That's the position from which Trump plays. The others need a good response, not lame repetitions of the the smug assurance that Trump is ridiculous. Not that he isn't. He is!

"Open Records Law in Peril in Wisconsin."

Video from the conservative MacIver Institute featuring and agreeing with liberal state senator Jon Erpenbach, who's railing against the change to the open-records law and whom the The MacIver Institute once sued under the open-records law:



I got to that video via my colleague Bonnie Shucha at WisBlawg, who writes:

Late last night, Wisconsin’s Joint Committee on Finance passed a motion (motion #999) to the Wisconsin state budget that would exempt “deliberative materials” like legislative drafting records and legislative briefings from Wisconsin’s open records laws....

Drafting records are used frequently by lawyers, journalists, analysts, and by the public to gain insight into the process by which legislation is created, influenced, and passed. Restricting access to this information would fundamentally limit the ability to conduct legislative research in Wisconsin.

What an embarrassing law change! The vote in the committee was completely on party lines, so Republicans are marking themselves with this.

Speaking of tags — see previous post — this gets my "stupid party" tag (which is not reserved for one party or the other — it goes to any party that is stepping up to distinguish itself as The Stupid Party).

UPDATE: Republicans back down from this folly.

"Indiana Democratic lawmaker forced to apologize for sexting with the same woman who was at the center of Anthony Weiner's sexting scandal."

Link.

Details here:

According to Fox411, [Justin] Moed sent graphic sexual texts to [Sydney] Leathers using the Twitter handle "Bitch Boy." The sexting relationship started when Moed responded to Leathers' Twitter post in February in which she said she was looking for a "new, legitimate #findom slave. Must actually be willing to spend money or you are useless to me."...

"I’m a little speechless," [Leathers] said. "I Googled him and found out he’s a lawmaker. Apparently only politicians can pick up on my pheromones.... Is he displaying poor judgment by sexting me of all people? Obviously... But should sexual situations define politicians? They are human, after all."

"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."

"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.

"Rubio has killed himself with his base through a classic example of hubris and Freshman overreach."

"He could have gotten behind an immigration bill, but getting behind this immigration bill, another cooked-up-in-a-backroom you’ve-got-to-pass-it-to-find-out-what’s-in-it monstrosity was a mistake. His second mistake, and the really fatal one, has been expressions of contempt toward his base. Suggesting that people who don’t support his bill are racist, and that American workers are dumb, is political poison. And his staff should know better than to say this kind of thing to any journalist, however friendly-seeming. All in all, a really disappointing performance from Rubio."

Writes Instapundit.

But why did the Freshman arrive at this hubris? How did he get into this position in the "Gang of 8" from which he could do this overreaching?

Seeing where he is and knowing that it was the insane, inane hopes that conservatives reflexively projected onto him, he understandably views this base as at least rather dumb and a tad racist.

"Republicans like him will soon be extinct, and that’s a good thing for the GOP."

"But in the meantime, when they make these remarks, it makes it harder for those of us who are trying to grow the base of our party."

Don't worry, kids. The bad ones are dying off. Please hang on for another 15 or 20 years, and we won't be toxic anymore. See ya then!

"Anybody on the Republican side even thinking or talking about running for president in 2016, I’ve said needs to get their head examined..."

Says the ever-helpful Bobby Jindal.

ADDED: In Jindalworld, the GOP is, right now, the stupid party, so anyone who currently believes he should be the candidate is stepping up to lead The Stupid Party and must be stupid. First, make the party smart. Then, we can talk about whether who should be leading it... obviously, someone who stepped up not to lead it in its present stupid form but who stepped up to make it smart. Which would be Jindal. Get it? He's running.

There! Did I examine his head well enough?

"Obama Will Include Same-Sex Couples In Immigration Plan."

That's your cue, Republicans, to say something stupid. He's roping you in. Come on. You can't resist!