"In Santorum’s Sweep, Sign of G.O.P. Unease With Romney" -- with insight like that, no wonder the NYT is the best damn paper in the galaxy

Plus a confidential to Shelly A.: Give it all up for Noot


by Ken

"Sign of G.O.P. Unease With Romney," eh? Ya think? (Not to be outdone, the Washington Post today has Dan Balz exploring "Mitt Romney and the enthusiasm gap.")

Howie has been writing regularly about the way in which the "opinion leaders" (for want of another polite term) of the Republican Party have determined that Willard Inc. is to be The Man for '12 -- and the lengths to which they've gone and are prepared to go to make it so. (By "lengths" I mean mostly the kind that can be measured in dollars, of course.) And at the time of the Florida Awakening the Incorporated Man showed signs of thinking he'd turned the corner, that from here on everything was going to come to him, the way it has all his life.

I don't want to cost the Incorporated One any sleep -- leastwise no more than he's already losing in the wake of last night's tristate debacle -- but indications are growing that they're on to you, and by "they" I mean, well, everybody, with the possible exception of your immediate family, and I wouldn't be too sure about them.

It's not just that you've kept demonstrating that you have no principles except your own personal greed and selfishness. (Believe it or not, "Someday I'd like to feel like a real boy" isn't a political program.) Well, it is that, but not just that. Just like it's not just that nobody trusts you, or that more and more of the 99% are realizing they don't figure in your thinking except as ballast -- though again, it is those things too. No, more than anything it's how much people really, really don't like you and just wish you would go away and leave them alone.

Maybe we should check in to see what the NYT has to say to back up its astounding claim that last night's GOP results might be a "sign of G.O.P. unease" with Dullard, I mean Willard. Here's reporter Michael D. Shear:

[Rick] Santorum's rebuke of Mr. Romney could scramble the dynamics of the Republican race even as many in the party's establishment were urging its most committed activists to finally fall in line behind Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor. Voters in three disparate states forcefully refused to do that on Tuesday.

Instead, the most conservative elements of the Republican Party's base expressed their unease with Mr. Romney by sending a resounding message that they preferred someone else. And they collectively revived the candidacy of Mr. Santorum, who has been languishing in the background since a narrow victory in Iowa's caucuses at the beginning of the year.

Mr. Santorum's success on Tuesday night awarded him no delegates from contests that were essentially nonbinding straw polls and drew small turnouts in all three states. And Mr. Santorum's campaign has few of the organizational advantages of Mr. Romney's well-financed effort.

The long-term damage to Mr. Romney is difficult to assess. . . .

Oh jeez, I apologize. I don't know what I was expecting. Maybe something with a little more backbone than that. Possibly even something along these lines:

FEBRUARY 8, 2012

Fact That No One Likes Him May Be Hurting Romney

Could Foil Bid to Become First Openly Assholic President


DENVER (The Borowitz Report) – Exit polls from last night’s Republican contests reveal that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s key obstacle to gaining the GOP nomination is the fact that voters cannot stand him.

According to Davis Logsdon, who conducted the polls for the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, “Despite his superb organization, funding, and ground game, Mitt Romney is having trouble overcoming the perception among voters that he is a ginormous dick.”

Mr. Logsdon said that these obstacles “could prove fatal to his historic bid to become the nation’s first openly assholic President.”

Exit polls taken last night bear out that theory, with a majority of voters agreeing with the statement, “I think Mitt Romney is so odious, I would rather vote for a random doofus I’ve never heard of who goes around in sweater vests.”

The beneficiary of that sentiment last night was former Sen. Rick Santorum, who told supporters at a victory rally in Missouri, "I support the rights of the unborn child until it's born and wants a gay marriage."

Speaking to supporters in Denver, Mr. Romney uttered what some political experts are calling a possible gaffe: “I don’t care about all the people who didn’t vote for me. They just envy my massive wealth. And poor people? They can curl up die, and I won’t lose a wink of sleep. I bet you a million crisp dollars from my vault in Geneva.”

But then, I don't suppose Mr. Shear's editors would have let him say anything like that. Not even anything like: "Man oh man, GOP voters sure seem to hate that son of a bitch Willard."

Mr. Shear does go on to sound what should be an ominous note for newly reenergized loonman Rick Santorum:

Aides to Mr. Romney said they were preparing to quickly expand their attacks on Mr. Santorum's record as they try to define him, aggressively and negatively, for voters who still see Mr. Santorum largely as a blank slate. The advisers said Mr. Romney would most likely take part in the attacks on Mr. Santorum much like he did in Florida against Mr. Gingrich.

And by the new Miracle of 2012 Campaigning, even with the strict ban on coordination, indeed on interfacing of any kind, between Candidate Willard and the supermost of the Super PACs, Mr. Shear allows the speculation that the new mood of "Let's crucify that effing Santorum" may somehow reach the ears of controllers of that Super PAC's purse strings.

I suppose it's too soon to say with assurance that Noot is a goner, gone to whatever hell the likes of T-Paw and Sarah and Michele and the other Rick and Herman have slithered off to. While last night's states weren't Noot-states to begin with, I get the feeling that we are indeed seeing signs that the Noot has succumbed finally to the 2012 GOP Curse: to know them is to wish they would, you know, go away and leave us alone.

So when self-styled GOP conservatives complain that Willard isn't conservative enough, and may not have felt all that much more comfortable with Noot, who may be more conservative but is really Willard's ideological twin in the steadfast belief in nothing so much as the holy trinity of Me, Myself, and I, Rick "The Fetus Boy" Santorum really and truly is, in addition to being a pathological liar and would-be thug, a movement-style conservative. However, he's also one of the more hateful beings crawling the planet (if anybody else had told the story of bring home the dead fetus of their not-to-be brother for his siblings to play with, wouldn't the child protection people be paying regular visits?), and with unlimited resources available to send the message, it may be received in fairly short order. (It's on the die-hard right-wing website Little Green Footballs, after all, that you'll read about the monumental hypocrisy of Mr. I Oppose Abortion in All Cases Even to Save the Mother's Life in "authoriz[ing] a partial-birth abortion to save the life of his wife." ("It's different when they do it, I guess," YukonCornelius began his June post.)

I do sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a Republican and be faced with the choices that you're faced with, being a Republican. But then I remember that these are people who made the choice to be Republicans -- what the hell did they expect?


CONFIDENTIAL TO SHELLY A.: IF YOU DON'T SINK ALL
YOU'VE GOT INTO NOOT, YOU'RE A GODDAM WUSS

Around the Time of Florida, when Noot showed signs of sinking into the earth (or should I say disappearing into Outer Space?), we started hearing talk that notwithstanding the hefty chunks of ill-gotten loot you've poured into his campaign, you were prepared to support the Inescapable Willard Inc. in the event that your loot proves insufficient to put your boy over the top. I'm here to say to you: Now just a darned second, buster!

Have you listened to the things Noot's been saying about Willard? He wouldn't kid about that stuff, would he? How could anyone who's so gung-ho for Noot turn around and pour all that swag into Willard's desperate campaign to Be Somebody After All? Now's not the time to get cold feet. You've got to give it all you've got! And I mean everything! Right down to the shirt off your back. Do you really want to be left feeling there's something you could have given which might have made a difference which you held back? Come on, Shelly, roll the dice for Noot! We know you're more accustomed to raking in the dough from all those sucker losers who roll the dice in your casinos. But do you want people pointing at you sniggering, saying, "There goes Shelly the Pussy"? If you wind up with a nickel left to your name, you haven't done your job.

(And if it should so happen that a nickelless Shelly suddenly becomes a more attractive target for normally fraidy-scared prosecutors, well, they'll give you three squares a day in the slammer. And trust me, Israel will be worlds better off without your "generosity.")

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