This One's Gonna Leave a Mark

Garry Wills writes a long political obituary for Mitt Romney in The New York Review of Books:

What happens to those who lose a presidential campaign? Some can do it with heads rightly held high, and go on to give valuable service to the nation. We were reminded of this just two weeks before the recent election, when George McGovern died. Though he underwent a humiliating defeat by Richard Nixon forty years before, he was a man of integrity, some of whose ideas were continued by people who worked in his 1972 campaign, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, veterans of his Texas office that year. McGovern was re-elected to the Senate after his presidential loss, where he performed important services, like defying the cattle, egg, and sugar lobbies to set up national dietary standards. This was a long-time commitment of his. Even before he went into the Senate, he had served as President Kennedy’s point man in the Food for Peace Program. In 1998, President Clinton appointed him his ambassador to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, where he worked effectively to curb world hunger. Above all, though he was a heroic flyer in World War II, he was a principled opponent of useless militarism.

What public service do we expect from Mitt Romney? He will no doubt return to augmenting his vast and hidden wealth, with no more pesky questions about where around the world it is stashed, or what taxes (if any) he paid, carefully sheltered from the rules his fellow citizens follow.

...snip...

Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to contemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it? His friends can only hope he is too morally obtuse to realize that crushing truth. Losing elections is one thing. But the greater loss, the real loss, is the loss of honor.

(via TBogg)

Can't Really Add Anything

SteveM offers us this cogent description of the latest example of the utter fail parade that is our national press:

But the press had a story. It's a great, multi-threaded story, really, even though nobody in the press thinks it is. It's a story the press could have been telling us for years, but never wanted to bother: the story of a major American political party going absolutely stark raving mad, while having the power and persuasive ability to potentially take the country with it. It's a party that flirted with nominating barking lunatics such as Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum before settling on a guy who was able to mollify supporters of those lunatics by faking (or imbibing) madness himself, by being a pathological liar, and by spending millions of dollars -- because this party is crazy about the rich, and has persuaded much of the country to want to coddle the rich even after the rich nearly destroyed the world.

(h/t DougJ)

Romnesia

This seems like a pretty effective campaign strategy:

(via)

In Search of An Anthelmintic

Here is an excellent New York Times article by Chrystia Freeland on the destructive behavior of the super-rich.  It aptly mentions Karl Marx's quote that capitalism "...carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction" as a result of the inevitable excesses that will occur in a system that relies on exploitation of labor by the owners of capital.  (For a related discussion, see this nice post at Crooked Timber describing a recent piece in the London Review of Books.)

I have come to view these destructive mega-rich as harmful parasites--perhaps like tapeworms that consume an every larger amount of the nutrient stream while contributing nothing to the host, only sickening it.  In an extreme case, the parasite causes the death of its host; this is understandable in the case of mindless worms or protozoa.  But at the level of human society, I am always amazed by behavior that may result in some short-term benefit, but is clearly not in the best interests of the actor's long-term survival.  In short, maybe the rich are not really much smarter than worms, and we should feel very little compunction about ridding ourselves of them.

Neutron Jack Runs Away

Good riddance, loser.

Take Santelli with you, would you?

Added:  John Cole piles on with a beautiful summation of the pathetic, thin-skinned manner with which these alleged masters of the universe go through life.  Most of them wouldn't last a day in a real job.

It's Inevitable

We are heading for a new Dark Age:

"God's word is true," Broun said, according to a video posted on the church's website. "I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior."

Broun is a senior member on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

These Guys Literally CAN NOT Be Parodied

Via Tbogg, here is an add from the Fox & Friends website for Thursday's show, in which Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson and NotSteveDoocy will be joined by a stunning line-up of intellectuals and political analysts.