The latest sign of trouble came Monday, when a woman speaking at a Mitt Romney event in Euclid, Ohio, said that Obama was operating outside of the Constitution and “should be tried for treason.” Many in the crowd of 500 applauded this call for the commander in chief of the United States to be charged with a capital offense.
But Romney didn’t push back against this outrage. Instead, he said he thinks the Constitution is “brilliant” and mentioned nothing about treason. Only when reporters pressed him later did Romney state that he did not, in fact, think Obama should be put on trial for being a traitor to his country.
This was just the latest instance of Romney being unwilling to confront the darker forces of the right …
Some take Romney’s reticence to challenge the right as evidence that he is the “severe conservative” he claimed to be. I suspect it has more to do with weakness: He has been so abused by the right for so long that he lacks the confidence to offend conservatives.
Mourdock’s success is decisive proof, if any more was needed, that the Republican Party has lurched far to the right of where it once was. Lugar was regularly described in the course of his reelection campaign as a “moderate.” But he is not a moderate, and never has been. He is a conservative who happens to be civil. Lugar earned a lifetime rating of 77 percent from the American Conservative Union. If being more than three-quarters to the right puts you in the “middle” of the political spectrum, it’s a very skewed measure.
Being a good tea party Republican, Mourdock is all about slashing government spending without regard to the impact of the cuts on the economy or on those who need government help. …
This gets us to the irony: Right now, it’s conservatives who want to follow the Western European path of austerity that voters in France and Greece rejected last weekend. The Obama administration, by contrast, has chosen a distinctly American path that kept austerity at bay. As a result, the American economy has climbed out of the Great Recession more quickly than most of Europe.
IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.
Despite his 2008 call to "let Detroit go bankrupt," presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Monday that he would "take a lot of credit" for his impact on the U.S. automobile industry’s comeback.
"If Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, co-opted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin?" So asked Bryan Fischer, a radio host with the American Family Association, after claiming credit for Richard Grenell’s scalp. …
If you want a politician to adopt your position, you shouldn’t then mock him for adopting your position. That’s not smart politics or lobbying; it’s public bullying as theater: "Ha ha! I made you do it!"
I think Michael Wiener is an insensitive boor, surely sexist, possibly racist (who isn’t). His bumper sticker: Guns don’t kill people, husbands who come home early kill people. Why didn’t his mindset die in the Sixties? Still, I agree with him: let the people decide. I hope the voters in his district kick his ass to the curb. If they don’t, well, that will say a lot about those voters. But electing the fool in the first place did that.
“There’s an election in 37 days and if the people at that time want to pick somebody else to represent them on the county commission, that’s certainly the way a democracy works that we all belong to,” KOB-TV quoted him as saying. “And I’m going to let the voters in my district speak rather than a few elected officials.”