The Phony Campaign

2011-12-04 Update

[phony baloney]

A quiet week for the Phony Campaign, with no changes in our candidate lineup, and no hit count changes large enough to affect the relative standings:

Query String Hit Count Change Since
2011-11-27
"Ron Paul" phony 32,700,000 +1,100,000
"Barack Obama" phony 15,700,000 -200,000
"Newt Gingrich" phony 9,880,000 +1,140,000
"Mitt Romney" phony 4,390,000 +90,000
"Jon Huntsman" phony 2,520,000 +60,000

  • Our phony poll leader is Ron Paul, and one of the 32,700,000 reasons is a Salon article from a guy named Gary Weiss: "Ron Paul's phony populism". Weiss attended a Paul rally in Keene, NH, and observed how Paul handled a group of disruptive Occupiers:
    It was a masterful performance. Ron Paul -- fraudulent populist, friend of the oligarchy, sworn enemy of every social program since Theodore Roosevelt -- had won the day, again.
    Yay! Oh, no, wait: Boo!

    Being a lefty, Weiss (of course) finds "a lot to like" Ron Paul's foreign policy stances. But the remainder of the article is just shock, horror, fear, and loathing of any suggestion that "populism" might be based in anything other than infatuation with big government.

    Weiss deems Ron Paul "phony", but it's obvious what Weiss really means is that Paul's a heretic, daring to question "progressive" idolatry, and (outrageously) doing so in the name of the masses. Weiss's undying, unquestioned, and largely unexamined faith is in the State. My guess is, as with most True Believers, Weiss's outrage is not based in the reasoned belief that Paul is wrong, but with the sick uncertainty that Paul might be right.

  • At the Huffington Post, Elayne Boosler ("Writer/comedian/animal activist") will have you in stitches, as she writes about President Obama's recent signing of a spending bill that undid the 2006 ban on domestic horse-slaughtering for (possible) human consumption. What brought it to our phony eye?
    This Assault on horses makes the president My Little Phony, or Alydar, Alydar, pants on fire. Animal rescuers are in a Fury and consider him no Black Beauty. They say "Adios, Mr. President, you have just committed Funny Cide". He took a Genuine Risk but ends up with no Cigar. Wish we could give him a Citation. Soon every horse will be a Horse With No Name. In other broken campaign promises, Mr. Obama has proven himself a Man o' War with his finger on the Trigger, keeping his War Admiral and his Secretariat of State always in a Phar Lap in a foreign land. By selling out America's horses, Mr. President, you missed the Bullseye. Adios, Achilles.
    Comedy and "animal activism": they go together like chocolate cake and grapefruit juice.

  • Geez, we haven't looked at Maureen Dowd for ages. If you're under your NYT free article quota, you might (or might not) want to see how she distinguishes the current GOP front-runners, in her usual stream-of-unconsciousness shtick:
    Mitt Romney is a phony with gobs of hair gel. Newt Gingrich is a phony with gobs of historical grandiosity.

    The 68-year-old [Gingrich] has compared himself to Charles de Gaulle. He has noted nonchalantly: "People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz." As speaker, he liked to tell reporters he was a World Historical Transformational Figure.

    Auschwitz? It's never safe to assume that Ms. Dowd is quoting people accurately, but Eric at Classical Values traced it back to Snopes, and pronounces it kosher. Unlike horse meat.

    (Eric's article is a good one to show any otherwise reasonable person who's thinking about voting for Newt.)

  • While Ms. Dowd is amused by the phoniness of the GOP frontrunners, John LeBoutillier, as a conservative GOP ex-Congressdroid, is dismayed.
    So the Republican race - in a year when President Obama is totally beatable -- has come to this: Newt Gingrich, serial philanderer, liar, hypocrite, secret Rockefeller Republican, back-stabber and megalomaniac versus Romney, the Supreme Panderer, the man-with-no-principles, an utter phony who will say anything and flip-flop at any time - and someone who was not a Reaganite until he ran for president in 2007.

    How can the GOP have sunk so low?

    Two candidates so flawed, so inherently fraudulent and so phony.

    Mr. LeBoutillier served with Newt in Congress 1981-83, and found him "the most egotistical, disagreeable, self-centered fraud in a House filled with similarly affected people."

  • Tom McGuire at Just One Minute considers a recent George F'n Will column that urges us to reconsider Perry and Huntsman. Tom's perspicacious comment:
    […] let me steal a point from (IIRC) Jonah Goldberg - Perry adopt[s] a lot of right-wing symbolism, as packing heat to gun down stray coyotes, but that masks some distinctly no-conservative attitudes on, for example, immigration. The net result is that conservatives feel more or less sympatico with the guy even though they don't agree with him on everything.

    Jon Huntsman, by pandering for the NY Times endorsement, has managed the opposite trick - people who might actually like his positions can't get behind a guy who clearly doesn't like them.

    An interesting, but still phony, approach.

Last Modified 2014-12-01 2:43 PM EDT