Earlier I think you had said that Romney, atypically of the GOP these days, didn't project his negative traits and failings onto Obama. I agreed with that point. It looks like we have to revise that assessment. Obama wasn't the (only) one out of the habit of listening to people who disagree with him.
Apparently not. The President could use some help here -- who of us cannot? -- but believing "unskewed polls"? That's taking the subject to a whole 'nother level. Unskewed polls are for talking billionaires out of their money. They are not evidence, for God's sake.
W was very different. Also, bear in mind, he and his advisors were reasonably certain they were losing in '04 as the polling came in.
I'm talking Weapons of Mass Destruction. Confidence that crosses over into arrogance, surrounded by Yes Men, subjected to bad and biased information from insiders, the refusal to look at outside evidence. A man who can't figure out he's going to lose an election when the evidence is right in front of him, i.e. Romney, seems to me very much like a man who could start a war for the wrong reason.
Another self-unaware post that applies more to the poster than to the person he's quoting. Brilliant.
Karl Rove: We had all these candidates that looked great on paper. Herman Cain looked great on paper. Rick Perry looked great on paper. Newt Gingrich looked great on paper. Val1: Wow. Just wow. I've posted this elsewhere, but in 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated two senators who would go on to lead the Senate, Howard Baker and Bob Dole, one future president, George Bush I, a congressman who would later run as in independent and capture 13% of the vote (!), another congressman and a pair of governors. While I'll concede that Rick Perry was playing the role of Texas governor who was so far out of his depth that the unintentional comedy meter was radioactive (Connelly in 1980), the simple fact is that this was the least credible slate of contenders in recent memory. Most of these guys didn't belong on a debate stage with Dennis Kucinich.
Maddow is often thorough, and she'll sometimes take time to build an argument. It's not all rousing rants. I'm not denying that some of her segments can simply be uninteresting, and sometimes she verges into partisan cheerleading too much for my taste. And inevitably, since she's on TV for an hour every day, she repeats herself. But on the whole I find that it's worth sitting through segments which seem a bit clunky or dry, because she's usually building to a worthwhile point.
But Dubya's reasons for believing all that stuff were "from the gut" - he believed things. Romney arrived at his conclusions for very different reasons - he made some assumptions, yes, but he's clearly a hugely confident person. And, given his record of success (which is pretty impressive despite the silver spoon), that's not surprising. If you've spent the past 30 years being a massively wealthy and massively successful man, it's a bit hard not to disassociate yourself from less happy outcomes - the same reason Romney's so bad at connecting with ordinary people. None of this makes Romney in any way stupid, it just suggests he has a skewed view of the world, which, again, is partially the result of being a movement conservative and partially the result of living in a bit of a bubble. But not stupidity. Say what you will about Romney, he's a very competent man.
I just can't watch her because she's so ********ing smug. And I'm generally on her side of the issues.
A former college roommate is now on a rant about the fact that Obama's apparent goal is to lower the U.S's standard of living to the "rest of the world" (everywhere else is third world he said) by spreading our wealth to the rest of the world. He is doing this via "racking up the debt" raising gas prices because he refuses to use "our resources in Canada", and Obamacare. Oh and he hates the troops. Can't forget that.
Basically, his circle is other successful people. From Harvard to Boston Consulting to Bain, and then, growing up with and around other LDS elites, he hasn't really seen failure. The only obvious failing was his father's presidential campaign (which, in the minds of the Romney clan, was sabotaged by Rockefeller), and by golly, he wasn't going to make the same mistakes.
I thought about making that joke, but I have standards! Well, he failed in a Senate run as well, but that was as a Republican in Massachusets, so is excusable. But otherwise, yes, no record of failure, and he was pretty young for his Dad's run, which is hardly a reflection on him.
Pretty much everything Rove does is Orwellian, but skewing unskewed polls and calling the newly skewed polls unskewed has gotta be #1 on the list. It's so perfect WSJ Op-Ed too.
He actually is doing better then me. Works at a big financial services company in Boston, while I sit here in grad school aiming for a job that probably takes two masters degrees to get and pays the same if not less.
Right right - just meant that he wasn't exposed to failure within his inner circle otherwise (his namesake is J.W. Marriott, for chrissake). re: George's presidential campaign - as young as Mitt was, it seems to have made an impression. Now, there are folks who suggest George lose because he was too honest in his assessment of Vietnam, and there are others who think Mitt didn't want to hang his political destiny on someone else, like George did with Rockefeller (from a subscriber-only New Yorker article). Either way, it explains the way he ran this year.
Yes, but as a friend of mine wrote about his favorite niece working in financial services: "She's very bright and she's also a great person, very genuine, so of course after a few years she wanted to leave the industry."
Well sounds like a good plan, we are the top 5%, maybe a little wealth transfer from the USA to the rest of the world would help end poverty and world hunger. Who here is down with paying a 75% tax rate to help the rest of the world? Let’s not be selfish.
I'd explain because obviously you arent grasping the point of my response, which in and of itself is even funnier, but quite frankly, you bore me.