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Romney’s Last Breath: Vote For Me Because GOP Will Forever Block Obama

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2009

As the world now knows, on January 20, 2009, the night Senator Barack Obama officially became President Barack Obama, Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and a dozen GOP Congressman — bolstered by Newt Gingrich and Fox News pollster Frank Luntz — got together for several hours in The Caucus Room, a high-end D.C. restaurant, and planned the demise of the nascent Obama presidency.

“The event — which provides a telling revelation for how quickly the post-election climate soured — serves as the prologue of Robert Draper’s much-discussed and heavily-reported new book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives,” Sam Stein at The Huffington Post reported, in an extensive and fascinatingly frightening examination of GOP practices, earlier this year:

According to Draper, the guest list that night (which was just over 15 people in total) included Republican Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), along with Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.). The non-lawmakers present included Newt Gingrich, several years removed from his presidential campaign, and Frank Luntz, the long-time Republican wordsmith. Notably absent were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) — who, Draper writes, had an acrimonious relationship with Luntz.

For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.

So, we’ve got 12 Republican Congressmen, plus Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz, and one unnamed participant, all in a restaurant plotting not a takeover of the government, but a disloyal opposition coup d’état-like plan in an absolute act of, in my opinion, something approaching, something almost akin to, something that sowed the seeds for something that others might call treason; the willful disregard of their fiduciary responsibility to work for the American people, not for the Republican Party.

This wasn’t party politics, it was a brazen act of using their elected offices and taxpayer-supported budgets, with the American people as collateral damage, to extinguish a presidency.

“In other words, there was nothing President Obama could have done to build common ground with Republicans,” The American Prospect reported:

“From the beginning, the plan was to relentlessly obstruct Obama, regardless of whether that was good for the country The GOP’s high-minded rhetoric of compromise and bipartisanship was bunk; cover for a plan to keep Democrats from accomplishing anything. It’s truly remarkable, and in an ideal world, would color any attempts from the GOP to portray itself as the victim of Democratic partisanship.”

Jonathan Capehart at The Washington Post offered this extensive take:

Republicans are complicit in the failures they rail against.

At first, we thought organized Republican recalcitrance against the president started in October 2010 after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) famously said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Then came Robert Draper’s book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives,” this spring. As the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reported in April, the book reports on a dinner of leading Republicans held the night of Obama’s inauguration.

…

The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward:

Go after Geithner. (And indeed Kyl did, the next day: ‘Would you answer my question rather than dancing around it — please?’)

Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)

Begin attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. (The first National Republican Congressional Committee attack ads would run in less than two months.)

Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.

Now Greg Sargent at The Plum Line is sounding the alarm over a revelation in “The New New Deal” by Grunwald. Vice President Joe Biden told the author that during the transition, “seven different Republican Senators” told him that “McConnell had demanded unified resistance.” This was after the 2008 election but before Obama and Biden took office.

“The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’ ” Biden says.

Nevermind the nation was falling off the fiscal cliff. Nevermind the global economic system was hanging in the balance. Nevermind we were on the verge of another Great Depression. When the nation needed single-minded focus, the Republican political establishment put power over the national interest.

So, the next time you hear Republicans and conservatives bloviating about the “failures” of the Obama presidency, remember the role they played in them. And remember how their resistance hurt the country they are elected to help govern.

“These Republican members of Congress were not simply airing their complaints regarding the other party’s political platform for four long hours,” Daily Kos wrote. “No, these Republican Congressional Policymakers, who were elected to do ‘the People’s work’ were literally plotting to sabotage, undermine and destroy the U.S. Economy. “

“And Republicans Engaged In Historic Levels Of Obstruction To Block Obama’s Initiatives,” Media Matters reports, adding, “Republicans Held Secret Meeting On How To Block Obama’s Agenda On The Very Day He Was Nominated.”

And Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly adds:

When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What is somewhat new, however, is a political atmosphere in which partisanship can be depicted as identical to civic virtue: that “saving” the country from its president is viewed by the rank-and-file of a major political party, and by its servants and masters in the chattering classes and activist circles, as a necessary and sufficient agenda. That, along with the ability to convince the news media that this attitude of 100% opposition was actually a frustrated effort to cooperate, was key to the GOP’s ability to maintain a united front against anything Obama proposed, even if it was the GOP’s talking points from the day before yesterday.

What’s more interesting to me than the evidence of a cabal to plot against the president (what does anyone suppose Republicans would be doing on the night of their opponent’s apotheosis, raising toasts to his success?) is how effectively dissenting voices were obscured or rubbed out. I mean, when, exactly, did Republicans as a group repudiate the Keynesian economics that had been the bipartisan background for how Washington dealt with rececssions going back to the 70s, reinforced by the supply-siders’ hatred for “root canal” austerity policies? How did they so quickly convince hundreds of people leaving jobs in the Bush administration to agree that their former boss and one-time maximum leader of the conservative forces was in fact an unprincipled Big Spender who had sold out The Cause? And at what point, exactly, did the Move Right To Win strategy that had always existed on the fringes of conservative political science circles become uniform orthodoxy, to the point that the 2012 GOP nomination contest because strictly a matter of identifying the maximum conservatism the political markets could bear?

 

Fast forward to 2010.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told the National Journal, “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” then repeated that idea everywhere he could.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=W-A09a_gHJc%3Fversion%3D3%26hl%3Den_US

Fast forward to this week.

“I’ve spent the morning reading various endorsements of Mitt Romney for president, and they all say the same thing: Mitch McConnell and John Boehner’s strategy worked,” Ezra Klein wrote in The Washington Post on Tuesday:

In endorsement after endorsement, the basic argument is that President Obama hasn’t been able to persuade House or Senate Republicans to work with him. If Obama is reelected, it’s a safe bet that they’ll continue to refuse to work with him. So vote Romney!

That’s not even a slight exaggeration. Take the Des Moines Register, Iowa’s largest and most influential paper. They endorsed Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2008. But this year, they endorsed Romney.

Why? In the end, they said, it came down to a simple test. “Which candidate could forge the compromises in Congress to achieve these goals? When the question is framed in those terms, Mitt Romney emerges the stronger candidate.”

The paper goes on to note that “early in his administration, President Obama reached out to Republicans but was rebuffed.” The problem, they say, is that “since then, he has abandoned the effort, and the partisan divide has hardened.” I’m not sure that’s an accurate read of the situation — Obama spent most of 2011 negotiating with John Boehner — but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that’s how the Register sees it, and it stands in contrast with Romney, who “succeeded as governor in Massachusetts where he faced Democratic majorities in the legislature.”

Of course, while Klein won’t say this, the Romney “succeeded as governor in Massachusetts where he faced Democratic majorities in the legislature,” idea is pure bullshit, as the New York Times last month reported:

“[Romney] vetoed scores of legislative initiatives and excised budget line items a remarkable 844 times, according to the nonpartisan research group Factcheck.org. Lawmakers reciprocated by quickly overriding the vast bulk of them.”

Fast forward to yesterday.

“In what his campaign billed as his ‘closing argument,’ Mitt Romney warned Americans that a second term for President Obama would have apocalyptic consequences for the economy in part because his own party would force a debt ceiling disaster,” Talking Points Memo’s Benjy Sarlin reported:

Romney said that Obama “promised to be a post-partisan president, but he became the most partisan” and that his bitter relations with the House GOP could threaten the economy. As his chief example, he pointed to a crisis created entirely by his own party’s choice — Republican lawmakers’ ongoing threat to reject a debt ceiling increase. Economists warn that a failure to pass such a measure would have immediate and catastrophic consequences for the recovery.

“You know that if the President is re-elected, he will still be unable to work with the people in Congress,” Romney said. “He has ignored them, attacked them, blamed them. The debt ceiling will come up again, and shutdown and default will be threatened, chilling the economy.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ItGodTIiukc%3Fversion%3D3%26hl%3Den_US

So, bottom line, this is the treason-ish compact forged by the GOP: Under cover of darkness, expensive single malt scotch, cigars, and center cut filet mignon, forge a plan to overthrow — if not the President’s first term, certainly — his chances for a second by defaulting (call it, “placing on hold,”) on your sworn oath to the American people that you will preserve and protect the Constitution — rationalizing that since, in your twelfth-century, science is bad, Obama isn’t a Christian, all’s fair in a religious war mentality — by making President Obama a “one term president” at any and all costs, including at the cost of helping millions of unemployed Americans become employed, downgrading the U.S.A.’s credit rating, and ruining the environment around the world.

Get it?

 

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News

‘Standards Have Evolved’: Senator ‘Leaning Yes’ on Hegseth Despite Misconduct Allegations

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December 3, 2024

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Despite facing allegations of sexual assault, “aggressive drunkenness,” financial mismanagement of veterans’ organizations, and a report his colleagues “smelled alcohol on him before he went on air,” at Fox News “as recently as last month,” U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) stated Tuesday that the standards for confirming presidential cabinet nominees have “evolved.” As a result, he indicated he is inclined to support Pete Hegseth’s nomination as Donald Trump’s next U.S. Secretary of Defense.

Saying that “of course” the multiple allegations against Hegseth are “concerning,” Senator Cramer told CNN’s Manu Raju (video below) on Tuesday, “I look forward to visiting with Pete, and I’m interested in who Pete Hegseth is today, and who he is going forward.”

Raju added that later, Senator Cramer “told me … that he is leaning yes, in supporting Pete Hegseth’s nomination, and I asked him if the standards have now changed in the United States Senate? Remember the last time the Senate voted down a defense secretary nominee or any cabinet nominee was in 1989. That was John Hightower over allegations of womanizing and also excessive drinking, including drunkenness.”

“And Cramer told me, ‘yes, the standards have evolved.’ And he says, ‘grace abounds,’ and he wants to see if Hegseth is in fact is a different person going forward.”

READ MORE: Trump Lining Up Billionaire Defense Investor and Megadonor to Be Number Two at Pentagon

Tuesday evening NBC News reported that “Ten current and former Fox employees say Trump’s pick for defense secretary drank in ways that concerned his co-workers.”

“Two of those people said that on more than a dozen occasions during Hegseth’s time as a co-host of ‘Fox & Friends Weekend,’ which began in 2017, they smelled alcohol on him before he went on air. Those same two people, plus another, said that during his time there he appeared on television after they’d heard him talk about being hungover as he was getting ready or on set.”

“One of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him as recently as last month and heard him complain about being hungover this fall,” NBC News added.

On Sunday, The New Yorker published a bombshell report revealing in part that a “previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events.”

READ MORE: How Democrats and Republicans Look at Hunter Biden’s Pardon and One for J6ers

“The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the ‘party girls’ and the ‘not party girls.’ In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting ‘Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!'”

That New Yorker report also alleges that a “trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.”

Mother Jones on Monday published “A Running List of the Allegations Against Pete Hegseth.”

The article, which has not been updated yet to include the latest NBC News allegations, characterizes them under the headings: “Mismanagement, a Drinking Problem, and Sexually Inappropriate Behavior,” “Rape Allegation,” and, “His Mother Called Him ‘an Abuser of Women’.”

CNN’s Manu Raju also talked with U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R-MA), who said, “As I’ve repeatedly said to you, I believe that we need an FBI background check to evaluate the allegations. We need to have the normal committee process of questionnaires, and questionnaires about this background and we also need to have a public hearing.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: SCOTUS Ethics Code Debate Split Liberal and Conservative Justices Amid ‘Legitimacy Crisis’

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Trump Lining Up Billionaire Defense Investor and Megadonor to Be Number Two at Pentagon

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December 3, 2024

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President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly set to nominate Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire defense industry investor and major Trump megadonor—despite his lack of military or organizational leadership experience—for the second-highest position at the U.S. Department of Defense, Deputy Defense Secretary. The Washington Post first broke the news on Tuesday afternoon, which comes as Trump’s pick for U.S. Secretary of Defense, Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth, faces mounting criticism and negative press amid numerous scandals including alleged sexual assault, “aggressive drunkenness,” and financial mismanagement of veterans’ organizations.

Trump has already offered the job to Feinberg, according to the Post, calling it “a decision that could elevate a longtime political supporter with investments in defense companies that maintain lucrative Pentagon contracts.”

“Feinberg is the co-CEO of Cerberus Capital Management, which has invested in hypersonic missiles and which previously owned the private military contractor DynCorp,” the Post reports. “DynCorp was acquired by another defense firm, Amentum, in 2020. During the first Trump administration, Feinberg led the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which provides the U.S. leader advice on intelligence assessments and estimates and counterintelligence matters.”

READ MORE: How Democrats and Republicans Look at Hunter Biden’s Pardon and One for J6ers

“The deputy defense secretary typically manages day-to-day operations of the massive bureaucracy with a combined workforce of more than 3 million service members and civilian employees,” the Post explained.

The current Deputy Defense Secretary is Kathleen Hicks. She holds a master’s in national security studies, and her PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Hicks started her career at the Pentagon as a civil servant in 1993. For three years she was a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) before returning to the Pentagon under President Barack Obama in 2009. She has served as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for strategy, plans, and forces, and Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for policy.

In 2020, President-elect Joe Biden chose Hicks to lead “the 23-person agency review team’s assessment of defense and national-security related issues,” Defense Daily reported.

“These teams are composed of highly experienced and talented professionals with deep backgrounds in crucial policy areas across the federal government. The teams have been crafted to ensure they not only reflect the values and priorities of the incoming administration, but reflect the diversity of perspectives crucial for addressing America’s most urgent and complex challenges,” the Biden transition team said in a statement, according to Defense Daily.

Feinberg has a bachelors’ from Princeton.

RELATED: ‘Two Things Could Be True’: White House Reveals Why Hunter Pardon Might Not Have Happened

In 2021, The New York Times reported that the four Saudis “who participated in the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training in the United States the previous year under a contract approved by the State Department, according to documents and people familiar with the arrangement.”

“The training was provided by the Arkansas-based security company Tier 1 Group, which is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management,” the Times reported.

In July of 2017, a New York Times report noted Feinberg’s ties to the now far-right podcaster and political strategist Steve Bannon, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

“Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, according to people briefed on the conversations.”

A 2012 Rolling Stone profile of then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney, included this statement from Feinberg.

“’We try to hide religiously,’ explained Steven [sic] Feinberg, the CEO of a takeover firm called Cerberus Capital Management that recently drove one of its targets into bankruptcy after saddling it with $2.3 billion in debt. ‘If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person,’ Feinberg told shareholders in 2007. ‘We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it.’ ”

READ MORE: SCOTUS Ethics Code Debate Split Liberal and Conservative Justices Amid ‘Legitimacy Crisis’

 

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How Democrats and Republicans Look at Hunter Biden’s Pardon and One for J6ers

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December 3, 2024

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Despite apparent consternation from a small number of Democrats—including Governor Jared Polis and U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, both of Colorado, and Senator Gary Peters of Michigan—a strong majority of Democratic voters support President Joe Biden’s decision to issue a complete, blanket pardon for Hunter Biden, his son, whom incoming Trump nominees are expected to continue to target. Multiple legal experts, including former federal prosecutors, have stated they would not have brought charges against Hunter Biden. The President and the White House have indicated the pardon was in response to Trump’s nominations.

A YouGov poll conducted Monday of over 3500 adults found 64% of Democrats approve of President Biden pardoning his son, while 21% disapprove. Nearly eight in ten Republicans (79%) disapprove. Overall, 34% of the country approves, and 50% does not. Adults 45 and older were the largest groups to disapprove.

“Biden didn’t just pardon his son, but he did so after repeatedly saying he wouldn’t, and he gave Hunter Biden an extraordinarily broad pardon, historically speaking,” reported The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake. “These numbers suggest it’s a mark against the outgoing president, but not exactly a scandal.”

RELATED: ‘Two Things Could Be True’: White House Reveals Why Hunter Pardon Might Not Have Happened

Blake also reported that previous polls showed Democrats had been opposed to the President pardoning his son.

He noted that the numbers suggest “the pardon might not be as big a stain on Biden’s legacy as it seemed it could be.” (Other news outlets, including Politico, have suggested the pardon has or will harm Biden’s legacy.)

The Post also reports the “reversal reinforces how partisanship can rein in such matters — how ideas that are highly unpopular in the abstract can win significant support when your side actually does it.”

Others have also spoken out against President Biden pardoning Hunter Biden.

Outgoing U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (who left the Democratic Party officially this year and declared independent status) told CNN the pardon makes President Biden’s legacy “more difficult,” and said Biden should have also pardoned Donald Trump to make it “more balanced.” Donald Trump had been facing close to 100 felony charges across multiple state and federal jurisdictions and courts on a wide variety of alleged criminal acts, including under the Espionage Act. Presidents cannot pardon state offenses.

RELATED: Why the Hunter Biden Pardon Is ‘Justified’ According to Legal Experts

Meanwhile, The Post also reports any possible pardons for those involved in the January 6 insurrection or other actions at the Capitol are strongly opposed—even by many Republicans.

“Polls show this idea has been very unpopular, and even many Republicans aren’t sold. A CNN poll in January showed 69 percent of American adults and even 46 percent of Republican-leaning Americans opposed the idea of pardoning most Jan. 6 convicts. And a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll a year ago showed just 26 percent of Americans and 42 percent of Republicans said punishments for Jan. 6 convicts were ‘too harsh.'”

However, Trump supporters’ perceptions could still change.

“Republicans have quite conveniently adjusted their views related to Trump and crime — and even the Capitol insurrection — plenty before, in Trump’s direction. And it could surely happen again.”

READ MORE: SCOTUS Ethics Code Debate Split Liberal and Conservative Justices Amid ‘Legitimacy Crisis’

 

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