“Morning Joe” Scarborough went on a rant over Michele Bachmann on Friday morning. The panel, which included guest Michael Steele were discussing the debate. Finally Joe just let it all hang out and unleashed an angry monologue which was quoted in Huffingtonpost.com:
“Michele Bachmann’s first answer was, I wish the federal government had defaulted. Had defaulted! A week after Americans lost–some of them perhaps lost half of their pensions. Lost half of their 401ks. When trillions of dollars went down the drain with Americans suffering, she said that and got applause, and if anybody thinks that guys like my dad are going to be voting that way…they are out of their mind and they are too stupid not only to prognosticate, they are too stupid to run Slurpee machines in Des Moines…Michele Bachmann is a joke. She is a joke. Her answer is a joke. Her candidacy is a joke…Iowa, if you let her win, you prove your irrelevance once again.”
“Tell us how you really feel,” panelist Michael Steele joked.
Scarborough went on to explain his rage:
Bachmann, he said, was symbolic of a kind of “conspiracy” that always happens in the early stages of presidential elections, where the base of the party pushes “somebody that is never going to win.” This, he said, allows the media to “run articles on these people on the far right and point for a year about ‘look how whacked out the Republican party is.'”
Scarborough said that the same thing happens every four years in Iowa, and pointed to Mike Huckabee’s surge in 2007 as evidence of this.
Scarborough left off a few people. Bachmann isn’t the only one who really doesn’t seem particularly mainstream. She is in good company.
Is there really only one Republican candidate? Does someone as out of the mainstream as Bachmann really stand a chance to be elected? People who like Bachmann like her because she represents their value system. I get that. But how many people’s value system agree there? 50% of American voters? I think not.
Each party usually sends up sending a moderate from each party out for the final leg of the race. The the other party spends all its time pointing out how the opposition is really extreme. Unless a candidate appeals to the independent middle, that candidate won’t be elected. That’s the reality of an election.
Republicans continue to shoot themselves in the foot by kicking and screaming over their own candidate. Democrats didn’t beat McCain, Republicans did. I can’t tell you how often I heard McCain called a RINO. Well…that kind of name calling isn’t going to elect a Republican.
Far Right Republicans need to either figure out how to convince over 50% of the voters to vote far right or they are going to have to follow what historically has been the tradition to elect an moderate as the party candidate. Then they are going to have to get behind that candidate. Its time for the freak shows to stop.
By the way guys, I am well aware of who made the leg tingle remark.
For the record, one person making a remark that no one but conservatives repeat doesn’t tar all non-republicans with said remark. It won’t work.
Moon, you could argue a good case that Washington doesn’t work. At least it seems no longer to work in a recognizable fashion even after you spent your entire adult life in Federal service. Czars in addition to Cabinet secretaries? Major laws of which we are not allowed to know the contents until AFTER they have been passed? Special Congressional Committees on top of regular committees and subcommittees? Agencies which are under the control of POTUS but which act like they are independent entities? Layer upon layer of intelligence/security authorities to a point where most people don’t really know anymore where that elusive buck is supposed to stop? Quite frankly, contemporary Washington is beginning to look to me like something dreamed up by Rube Goldberg.
You can also argue a good case that Washington has been around a long time and that traditions and rules have been established. The federal city doesn’t take well to interlopers who come in and try to change the rules of the game.
psssstttt Obama wasn’t the first person to appoint czars. Czars don’t replace cabinet secretaries. Czars are experts who come in to attack one trouble spot in a department. The Drug Czar comes to mind. There have probably been as many R czars as D czars.
It is impossible to hang the czar title onto Obama, try as you might.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._executive_branch_czars
Hmmm, the Matthews remark doesn’t apply? Well, I posit that Matthews was a little prescient there. I think that there were a lot of voters who followed Obama simply for “Hope and Change” and out of dislike of the Bush administration. This includes not only Democrats but also Independents and even some Republicans of my acquaintance. When you asked them for details, for an explanation of what all that hope and change meant in concrete terms, they really didn’t have a solid clue beyond gut emotion about where exactly they were going. If that isn’t casting a vote because of an emotional tingle up your leg or in your brain or in your left big toe, I don’t know what is. Not everyone, of course, but a sufficient number to bring to mind a sort of modernized version of the Pied Piper.
But, like all tingles, they eventually diminish. I hear the disapproval rating for the POTUS has reached 49% in that Democratic bastion of all Democratic bastions called New York.
Czars? Moon, look at the chart in your own Wiki link. During the last two administrations there has been a veritable plague of “czars” in comparison to those since the national crises of the Great Depression and WWII. Rube Goldberg has been at work longer than just the past three years, and I put no precise administration timeframe on my comment. I left service during the Clinton administration. I don’t think that, if I went back, I would recognize the place anymore, not even my own former turf. But it would certainly have helped if the POTUS of whatever czardom had allowed those czars to go before the Senate so we could better clarify this Goldberg contraption for Joe Public. And here I always thought, simple old me, that focus on specific troublespots was a job for assistant secretaries or deputy assistant secretaries or department heads, even the creation of new offices under such titles in an easily understood chain of command. Now we look as bizarro administratively as the former government of Imperial Russia.
@Moon-howler
Um, no. Because I want to completely change how DC works. Its broken.
You don’t make changes by getting in the face of tradition. You legislate change. You don’t go in and spit in the face of tradition. That’s what carpet baggers do.
For starters, not to nitpick, but….DC generally refers to DC (city)govt. Washington, DC is the federal end of it. Little things make a difference.
@Cargo, when was it ever ‘unbroken?’ That is cliche. There might laws you don’t like. That doesn’t make the workings of our political system broken.