Republican Nuts and Flakes.
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011
You have to be crazy to swallow this stuff.
Posts Tagged ‘Certain Doubt’
Why Newt Gingrich Will Never Be President
Thursday, December 8th, 2011
Newt Gingrich will never be president of the United States.
My reasoning is simple:
1 Newt Gingrich is too intelligent to be president.
Republicans voters don’t trust Presidents that talk down to them or who come off as acting smarter than they are. Evidence? George W. Bush. In order to get elected he had to drop his rich elitist cloak and don the mantle of the “good ole boy” Texan. As a University professor who loves peppering his speeches with adverbs, Newt simply can’t dumb down his rhetoric enough to appeal to dumb and intellectually insecure voters.
2 Newt Gingrich is too unlikeable to be president.
The last time Newt got close to being president (as Speaker of the house) he pissed off so many people that even his own caucus voted to remove him. Again, republican voters seem to favor candidates like “W” who look like a guy they’d like to sit down and have a beer with. If you went out drinking with Newt he could probably quote you chapter and verse about how the bar should fire the janitor and hire some poor black kid so he could learn the “value of hard work.” But ask him about baseball or NASCAR and you’ll probably get a blank stare. The sad fact is, nobody likes Newt.
3 Newt Gingrich has too much baggage.
Two divorces – the second one while he was having an affair with his current wife – house censure for ethics violations, tax evasion charges. After a while even the most dyed-in-the-wool fiscal hawk has to admit, Newt has an image problem when it comes to honesty and trustworthiness. And while he may not admit to a drinking problem – like W did – he also doesn’t have enough money or media connections to make his baggage go away. Again, for the “values voters” things like marital fidelity matter.
4 Newt Gingrich is short.
It is an axiom among presidential campaigns that the taller of the two candidates usually wins. This is not always true but in this day and age of media blitzes and presidential photo ops, it’s harder and harder to make up for one’s, shall we say, shortcomings? Newt’s website lists him at 6′-0″. I don’t believe it. Compared with either Barrack Obama or Mitt Romney, he looks like a short, pudgy white guy who could really use some of John Boehner’s Quick Tanning Lotion. I think the only way Newt can overcome being height challenged is if he saws about six inches off of Romney’s legs.
5 Newt Gingrich doesn’t want to be president.
From the early fiasco of taking a cruise while the other contenders were out knocking on doors, to his continuing reliance on book signings to keep him in the public eye, Newt appears as a man who would rather continue giving lectures at 80,000$ a pop and raking in money as a high paid lobbyist and corporate shill than be President. I mean really, can you conceive of a Commander in Chief who puts meetings with Putin and Merkel on hold because he’s got a date at Barnes and Nobel? What’s he going to do when there’s rioting in the streets because people can’t even find work as school janitors… give a lecture at Watsa-Motta-U.?
Conclusion:
I can hear some of you out there whining: “If he’s not serious about running, why is are republicans giving him so much credence?” I have a theory about this. When it comes to defeating Barrack Obama republicans know they have an image problem. They are running against an established incumbent who was swept into office on a tide of popularity. While that popularity has waned some, in close elections, the incumbent almost always gets the nod. Thus the only thing they can do is present a bunch of wacko candidates who say wacko things, keep the republican meme of “don’t tax the for job creators” and position themselves so that when the “reasonable” one in the field emerges on top – Mitt Romney – all the republicans can breathe a sigh of relief and say “at least we didn’t get [fill in the blank]. So all Newt really is, is the latest Cain/Bachmann/Santorum/Perry: a stalking horse who will say outrageous things to keep people tune in to the “debates.”
It’s classic slight of hand. Listen to Newt try to reason that child labor laws are actually bad for poor kids. All the while, the corporatists in the House and Senate pass bill after bill designed to rip off the tax payer by reducing corporate taxes and regulations and passing the cost off onto you and me.
Trust me on this one. Come the election next year, Newt will be a distant memory.
Palin for President? Seriously?
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
Be honest now. Can you really see yourself voting for this woman President of the United States?
It Always Comes Down to Money.
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
In the end it always comes down to money.
The recent article in the New York Times by David Sanger and Elisabeth Bumiller entitled “Pentagon to Consider Cyberattacks Acts of War,” presents a chilling scenario:
“The Pentagon, trying to create a formal strategy to deter cyberattacks on the United States, plans to issue a new strategy soon declaring that a computer attack from a foreign nation can be considered an act of war that may result in a military response.
The new military strategy… makes explicit that a cyberattack could be considered equivalent to a more traditional act of war.” NYT
Just what constitutes a “cyberattack” is not made clear except to say that “any computer attack that threatens widespread civilian casualties — for example, by cutting off power supplies or bringing down hospitals and emergency-responder networks — could be treated as an act of aggression.”
That the Pentagon should employ such a broad reaching definition for cyberattack should give us pause. But it is the proposed response to such an attack that is really mind blowing. In a Wall Street Journal article Pentagon officials outlined the rationale behind the policy:
One idea gaining momentum at the Pentagon is the notion of “equivalence.” If a cyber attack produces the death, damage, destruction or high-level disruption that a traditional military attack would cause, then it would be a candidate for a “use of force” consideration, which could merit retaliation.
WSJ
Given the increasing alacrity with which the United States has been exercising its military muscle around the world, the conclusions about the effects of this policy are inescapable. As one military official is quoted as saying:
“If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.”
The putative logic presented by the Pentagon is that by laying out a clear and forceful policy for dealing with threats such as malicious cyber attacks, the Pentagon will – at least in theory – provide a deterrent. The model quoted in the article is that of the deterrent posed by an American policy of absolute retaliation in the event of a nuclear attack.
“A parallel, outside experts say, is the George W. Bush administration’s policy of holding foreign governments accountable for harboring terrorist organizations, a policy that led to the U.S. military campaign to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan.” WSJ
The main problem with the Pentagon proposal is that it is a stunning display of overkill. Not only is it hard to imagine which foreign country would be lurking out there with the capability or desire to inflict lethal cyber-damage on the United States, but it defies belief that any bit of cyber chicanery that such a country could come up with could possibly produce the kind of devastation that a single nuclear warhead could wreak. Thus, the kind of “mutually assured cyber-destruction that the Pentagon is implying is not only unnecessary, it is incredibly assymetrical and in no way “equivalent.” It’s sort of like responding to a bee sting by hitting the hive with a 2,000 lb. bunker buster.
Another problem with the Pentagon’s policy is that most of the cyberattacks that the United States has acknowledged have come not from foreign nations at all but from independent hackers and loose-nit organizations such as “Annonymous.” Given the broad definition the Pentagon puts forth it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to label any malicious cyber activity as an attack that would merit a military response. One can even envision a group of strategists in the Pentagon basement thinking up strategies for dropping a smart bomb down Julian Assange’s chimney.
Even when cyber attacks represent legitimate threats, it is often difficult to pin down where the attack originates from. As the NYT article notes:
“During the cold war, deterrence worked because there was little doubt the Pentagon could quickly determine where an attack was coming from — and could counterattack a specific missile site or city. In the case of a cyberattack, the origin of the attack is almost always unclear, as it was in 2010 when a sophisticated attack was made on Google and its computer servers. Eventually Google concluded that the attack came from China. But American officials never publicly identified the country where it originated, much less whether it was state sanctioned or the action of a group of hackers.”
“One of the questions we have to ask is, How do we know we’re at war?” one former Pentagon official said.
Another variable not explored in either the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times is the sometimes tenuous dividing line between the U.S. government and the defense contractors it employs. For example, Lockheed Martin recently claimed it’s information systems were the target of a “cyber attack”
Given the fact that Lockheed Martin’s products include the Trident missile, P-3 Orion spy plane, F-16 and F-22 Raptor fighter jets and C-130 Hercules military cargo planes among many other major weapons systems, could this attack on a private corporation be considered an attack on the United States and thus one that would merit a military response by the U.S. military? With all the various contractors and sub-contractors now employed by the Pentagon would a cyber attack on any of them be considered an act of war?
If the danger is not clear and present, if the culprits are hard, if not impossible to identify, and if the list of targets is endless, why on earth would the Pentagon be proposing military action, i.e. war, as a response?
Not surprisingly, like so much that comes out of the Pentagon , the answer comes down to money.
“The Pentagon strategy is coming out at a moment when billions of dollars are up for grabs among federal agencies working on cyber-related issues, including the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. Each has been told by the White House to come up with approaches that fit the international cyberstrategy that the White House published in May. “
Thus, once again, the Pentagon’s strategy for dealing with a perceived attack has little or nothing to do with protecting the homeland.
Surprise, surprise. Once again, it’s all about the Benjamins baby!
Paul Ryan Wants to eat your Grannie
Thursday, May 26th, 2011
Just another republican vampire.
Source: http://i.imgur.com/sEvia.jpg
