Pun Salad

President Obama increases his phony lead this week, while Mitt, Michele, and Sarah are in a tight battle for second place:

• Although we concentrate on the presidential race here, David Friedman makes a point about the essential phoniness of the debt ceiling debate, too insightful and timely to avoid quoting:
  It is an entertaining example of the game of Chicken as played by politicians but of limited importance otherwise, since both sides are focused not on how to deal with the long term debt problem but on the terms on which they will agree to postpone dealing with it.

• The phoniness of the debate is magnified by the phoniness of the participants. Rand Simberg quotes a Hot Air comment, which was in response to Senator Bernie Sanders' wish that President Obama had some effective intra-party opposition.
  Obama is a bland take-no-chances-unless-other-people-are-doing-the-hard-work type of guy. He's not a leader, but just a vessel through which the left thought they could get all their pet projects passed, by endowing Obama with Absolute Moral Authority by virtue of his historic position.

  But to get elected, Obama had to have a bland, beta-male personality, and that's what's driving the left crazy. People like Bernie knew Obama was lying to swing voters in 2008 about being a moderate; they just thought he was also lying to them about being a beta male. Now that he's got push back from House Republicans on his and the left's pet issues, he doesn't have the stomach to either take on the GOP ideologically by presenting a plan of his own, or to tell his own side to pound sand and move towards a compromise deal the way Clinton did on welfare reform.

  Shorter: "They thought he was phony, but not phony in that particular way."

• I was hopeful about this Washington Examiner article's headline:
  GOP contenders deride 'phony' debt ceiling crisis

  But alas, although 'phony' is inside quotes, no actual candidate is quoted using the word. (Isn't there some kind of journalistic rule about not putting things inside quote marks unless somebody has actually said them?)

  But the article's author is kind of put out with the candidates' unwillingness to stake out any position that might irk us Tea Partiers:

  When pressured to take a position on the default debate, Republican contenders have opted to embrace Tea Party views or remain quiet on the issue altogether.

• Mitt Romney, according to the Columbus Post-Dispatch, is following both a keep-quiet and embrace-tea-party strategies:
  Appearing before about 200 people at Screen Machine Industries yesterday, Romney did not mention the swirling [debt ceiling] controversy in his 20-minute speech and only fleetingly stated his position after being cornered by reporters.

  "My position is very clear, which is, I favor a 'cut, cap and balance' program for federal spending," Romney said, ignoring follow-up questions.

  His stance apparently comports with a bill favored by the tea party and passed last week by the GOP-controlled House - and killed by the Democratic-dominated Senate - that would require Congress to cut spending, cap future spending, and approve a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

  Jen Rubin found Mitt to be "the closest of the Republican presidential contenders to sounding sane." That's kind of faint praise, but I'm sure Romney appreciates it.