A Tale of Two Androids

I think at this point, we can all agree that Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. Regardless of what Newt Gingrich might think, assuming that he does think at all, or the fondest hopes of the Paultards for a brokered convention (Please. I could use the entertainment.), he's going to be the guy who gets to lose to President Obama on the first Tuesday of November (Cthulhu willing).

(H/T Shakesville)

The problem with Willard "Mittens" Romney is that in a time when the economy could, at best, be described as "meh" for most people, he is rich. And not only is he rich, but he's like a caricature of a millionaire. He talks about how he doesn't follow NASCAR a lot, but he has friends who own NASCAR teams. His wife owns two Cadillacs, and his renovated house in California will apparently have a garage large enough that he'll need an elevator to move his cars around. He tried to pander to Wisconsonites by joking about the time his Pappy moved a factory from Michigan to Wisconsin. When he went to college, he paid for his apartment by selling stock Pappy gave him for his birthday. I think what we've got here is a failure to communicate.

And you might say, "Dude, you're being unreasonable when you expect a millionaire born to a wealthy family to connect with ordinary people." The problem with that line of argument is that the 43rd President was a millionaire born to a wealthy family, and he spent eight years in the Oval Office. Not only that, but both Dubya and Mittens were born to politically connected families. The difference between them is that Mittens can legitimately claim to be a businessman of enough skill to have made some money, even if it came at the cost of American jobs. Before Bush became Governor of Texas, he basically failed into one company after another.

But one of them was someone a lot of Americans could relate to enough that they could picture sitting down with him and having a beer with him, while the other is stiff and awkward around potential voters, and doesn't know how to pander. Say what you will about Dubya, he at least seemed like a reasonable facsimile of a regular American. His policies may have been disastrous, and he may have left office with Nixonian approval ratings, but he had a modicum of personal charm.

I think the difference can be expressed in fictional terms by comparing both of them to notable TV androids. In this analogy, Bush is one of the skinjobs from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. He looks and acts human, and only when you dig beneath that exterior do you find the heart of a robot bent on exterminating humanity.



Mittens, on the other hand, is Data, from Star Trek: The Next Generation. He's obviously not entirely human, even though he tries to act like a human, and it doesn't take a keen observer to detect this. He's making a valiant effort to seem human, but it doesn't come naturally to him, and it's pretty obvious.



I'm sure he's desperately hoping that doesn't turn out to be a problem in November.

Tea Party Parasites

Hypocrite Joe Miller: I am not a hypocrite.

Back in June, Miller was saying this about his Republican primary opponent Lisa Murkowski, blasting her for supporting a state health care program:

As you are aware, just last week the Anchorage Daily News reported that the Denali KidCare Program funded 662 abortions last year. Senator Murkowski has been a champion of this program, voting against the majority of her Republican colleagues for CHIPRA (HR 2) in January of 2009.

Of course it now turns out that back in the Nineties, Miller himself and his three children (with one on the way; he now has eight) were at one point receiving assistance via a program almost exactly like the Denali KidCare program, which is only for low-income earners. Various reportsnote that Miller received this assistance after he’d bought a house and been hired by a prestigious law firm; he also got low-income hunting and fishing licenses during that time. It’s also come out that he received some $7,000 in farm subsidies and that his wife received unemployment insurance benefits.

But, but, young bucks buying t-bones!


Miller basically goes on to justify this by saying that he used it just to get through hard times, not like those moochy poor people who spend their lives on it. He also argues that welfare programs should be controlled by states, which is utterly incomprehensible to me. Why would states do better at managing welfare programs than the federal government? It's just useless bullshit dogmatic federalism.


This is one of the things I find fascinating about the Tea Parties. You have seniors carrying big signs demanding that the government get out of their Medicare, and demanding that there be no socialized medicine (except for Medicare). You have military veterans angrily insisting that the federal government is a big anti-federalistic parasite. Except of course that the government trained them, paid them, and took care of them in the military; and now that they're out, they probably get some kind of pension (or maybe they're in the Reserves)


But these things are not inconsistent to the Tea Party. Because they are Patriots, and those poor people (generally presumed to be of different skin color) are just big ol' moochers who don't want to be productive.


No double standard here, folks. Move along, move along.


(thx Kos)