Crazy like a fox: That Willard gins up an insanity defense! Plus hot graphics for the 2012 GOP campaign

The style may be a trifle retro, but doesn't this cartoon by Syd Hoff capture the nuances of Republican thinking about unions -- and malcontents generally. (Hat tip to Mayor Mike and New York's Finest for their OWS work.)

by Ken

What happens when one candidate in a presidential campaign has to be locked up in the booby hatch? Do they call the election off, or what? Bear with me for a moment.

AmericaBlog's John Aravosis has a theory about the Incorporated Willard that seems to me almost irrefutable in its simplicity and plausibility: "Romney's poor management skills aren't a gaffe, they're a feature."

The idea that Mitt Romney is a "good manager" has now been proven false. The ongoing disaster that is his presidential campaign proves that Romney isn't Mr. Fix-it, he's Mr. Broke-it.

John summons examples that are hard to argue with:

* the way he"botched the religious right furor over his foreign policy spokesman being gay."

* the foreign trip during which "he offended the British, insulted both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and then desecrated a Polish holy site for good measure."

* the Republican convention, "which Romney was in charge of."

* "Romney's Al Haig moment during the Libya/Egypt crisis."

* Just this week, "Romney's "You're fired!" video to 47% of the American people."

* And "Mrs. Romney's ill-fated "Mitt doesn't disdain the poor" video last night."

Put it all together and John is prepared to go beyond the argument of AmericaBlog's Chris in Paris "that Mitt's much-famed CEO skills don't necessarily make him a good president:"

I'm wondering whether we've got the story wrong. Mitt Romney isn't a bad presidential candidate because he's a good CEO. Maybe he's a bad candidate because he's a bad CEO.

I'm going to take this one step further. I think Willard's cooking up an insanity defense. Maybe he's been thinking along the lines Howie pursued the other day: the directions in which fingers of blame may be pointed if his campaign winds up the way it's looking now. Or maybe all his working life he's had the sense that he's only one step ahead of the authorities ready to nab him for his life of economic raping, pillaging, and plundering -- and he's had it in the back of his head that one way out is (you guessed it) an insanity defense. Maybe he thinks it beats the alternatives: that he's either a criminal predator or a bumbling incompetent.

Something along these lines is the only explanation I can think of for our Willard's sudden disclosure that he thinks that he, unlike the Accursed American 47%, is a maker and not a taker. Whereas anyone who know about his "career" of sucking every bit of life he could out of the economy knows that the exact opposite is true. He's a taker and a destroyer.

Or . . . maybe he's just nuts! Can anyone prove otherwise?

John A, apparently, is going with the "bumbling incompetent" theory, and I can't quarrel with that one either. Doesn't it kind of put you in mind of our last CEO president? You know, the one who thought he was the mastermind of his succession of successively vaulting corporate triumphs?

MEANWHILE, BOB MANKOFF DUSTS OFF SOME SPLENDID
ART THAT THE REPUBLICANS COULD RECYCLE FOR 2012

It's in the New Yorker cartoon editor's new e-newsletter-slash-blogpost, "The Ruling Clawss," in which he takes advantage of the centenary to recall the work of longtime New Yorker cartoonist Syd Hoff (1912-2004), He shows us samples of the Depression-era down-classing in Hoff's work from the upper-class swells who had populated the cartoons of earlier cartoonists like Peter Arno.

More importantly, he introduces us to Hoff's alter-ego.

[I]f Hoff’s New Yorker pen left the very rich unscathed, a pen name, A. Redfield, let him express very different feelings in a very different New York publication, The Daily Worker.

In a series of single-panel gags called “The Ruling Clawss,” which ran from 1933 to 1935 in The Daily Worker, Redfield dealt with issues that Hoff could not.

A collection of these panels were published in a book of the same name, in 1935.

Here are some samples:

REPUBLICAN POLICY ON ILLEGAL ALIENS & IMMIGRATION

ISN'T WILLARD HIMSELF "MR. FIRE 'EM"?

WILLARD ON THE "DEPENDENT" 47%

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