To the victor go the spoils

[fpb]

The bad news: Mitt Romney has won, and he has won by means it would be kind to call dishonourable. Both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum's evident hatred for the man is perfectly justified: a man with neither the personal vivacity and talent of Gingrich nor the principle of Santorum has defeated both by using avalanches of money to drag both their names in the mud (think of the disgusting attack on the Santorums' mourning for a stillborn baby) as well as those of anyone who stands in their way. The good news: if the only point of politics is defeating Obama, Romney is well placed to do just that. Obama carries as much baggage as Gingrich and far more than Santorum, and if Romney uses his attack-shark tactics as ruthlessly as he has done it against his Republican opponents, Obama will be facing something he has never had to face in his life. Nobody can underrate the force of the Democrat response, but the difference is that where Romney is concerned his electorate will already have heard it all. They will know he is a twisty, sleazy crook with etch-a-sketch principles and no respect for any values; they will know that whatever his Mormon religion amounts to, it certainly does not constrain him in the political field; and they will know that he prefers fighting dirty. In other words, they have another Nixon on their hands. But hey, if that is what it takes to beat the incumbent....

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I also despise Romney, but given that Obama seems to be incompetently steering the world toward a likely outbreak of multiple small-scale atomic wars, I'd rather see Romney win the 2012 elections.

I'm quite serious about my claim. Obama is just watching mesmerized as North Korea and Iran acquire nuclear weapons, and is not acting rapidly enough to carry out a Diplomatic Revolution with India and Pakistan. He reminds me in this regard very much of James Buchanan -- the President whose inaction was a major cause of the American Civil War. It's well beyond Jimmy Carter's incompetence -- when Jimmy Carter realized the Soviets were heavily arming, he responded with his own arms programs and diplomatic maneuvers, he didn't just sit there admiring his own face and lamenting the lack of appreciation he got from his political rivals. Obama's incompetence is in a class all its own.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I agree about Carter. By the end of his presidency, disappointed ex-supporters were calling him "a born-again hawk". It was he who made an issue of Afghanistan, where he might have actually avoided it, since it was one pro-Soviet government overthrowing another. But although he seems to have wholly unlearned since what he learned in his last two years, at the time he did seem to have learned his lesson. Obama is just bumbling along letting himself be blackmailed by the cheapest and most despicable crooks on the international scene.

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

I am by no means a fan of Rick Santorum, but I wanted to throttle the people who kicked up a fuss about how he and his family dealt with the tragedy of a stillbirth. I may hate---no, I do hate---a great many people, but I do have some notions of limits on what is and is not acceptable to attack them over.

If any of my friends had caught me behaving in such a low-down manner, even toward a declared enemy, I'd have had my arse kicked clear around the block and back. And I'd have had it coming.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Amen. But what is sickening, looking back, is my confidence that Romney would have dealt with Obama as he dealt with Gingrich and Santorum. After using the lowest of low means to get rid of both, he apparently experienced a sudden conversion to gentlemanliness and treated Obama, the Chicago machineer, with all the respect that he had not given to Santorum. His defeat was deserved, humiliating and, I hope, definitive; but the Republican party machine that backed him seems to have learned nothing from the disaster. They still are much more concerned with stomping on any internal social conservatism than with opposing Democrat radicalism.

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

Other politicians, Republicans in particular, are handicapped against Obama by his skin color. The mainstream media in the US is convinced that the Republican party is practically the Ku Klux Klan in suits, and would interpret even routine, normal political attacks against Obama as "racist."

Back when the "birther" thing was big in the news, I theorized that Hillary Clinton, even if she'd uncovered real evidence that Obama was not an eligible candidate for the Presidency due to not being a natural-born US citizen, might have refrained from using that evidence to destroy his candidacy for fear of destroying her own political future which is, for worse or worse, tied to the Democratic party. If she had, it would have set off an internal civil war among the Democrats, and Hillary would forever be "the racist pig who sank the black candidate."