Pun Salad

Our arbitrary Betfair-based selection criteria once again produces the same phonies. Mitt's huge Google hit count last week was a glitch as suspected, and he's come crashing back to earth:

• The Washington Post's Jen Rubin thought Romney was dreamy four years ago. But now, not so much, as she gives advice to Jeb:

  But above all, [Jeb] needs to be himself — a wonkish, optimistic, forward-looking conservative. Candidates who aren’t themselves eventually get into trouble, as Romney did in 2008 coming out as a fire-breathing conservative and Paul has done in insisting his foreign policy is Reagan-esque when it is more Kucinich-esque. Romney’s entry into the race by announcing his strategy (run to the right of Bush, care about the poor) was so blatantly phony it serves as an example of what not to do. If Romney wants to mimic Huckabee on gay marriage, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on immigration and Paul on the Federal Reserve, that should be of no concern. (Is Romney going to threaten a trade war with China as he did last time?) Romney will talk his way right out of the establishment circles that are his main source of support if he goes down that road. Bush, by contrast, can say he is not severely conservative, or libertarian conservative, but a conservative with a reform agenda. If that’s not good enough, he won’t win the race. Worse things — like losing your soul and respect of others — can happen.

  I demand solid proof that any politician in the race has not lost their soul or respect of others.

• Jonathan V. Last has a good article about Mitt's presidential ambitions.
  Having followed Romney around in both 2008 and 2012, I was always convinced that the odds of him running in 2016 were high. For one thing, the man has a decades-long history of running for office, over and over, even after voters reject him. He’s a career politician without a “career” in politics. (He was an active governor of Massachusetts just long enough to build Romneycare, and after that he spent the rest of his term preparing for his first presidential bid.) He has never in his life—not once—shown a willingness to take “no” for an answer from the electorate. Running for office is what he does.

  The other thing that struck me was that Romney really wanted to be president. A lot. The reasons for this desire weren’t immediately obvious. He has—clearly—very few deeply-held political convictions. He has—again, clearly—no Big Ideas about ways in which he wants to lead the country. The sense I always got (and this might be incorrect—I’m not his rabbi) was that Mitt Romney wanted to be president because he wanted to be president. And when the impulse to run is yoked to personal ambition and removed from politics, philosophy, or the world of ideas—well, that sort of yearning dies hard. Which is why, in January of 2012, I started saying that if Romney wasn’t elected president, I expected he would try again in 2016.

  Very insightful, RTWT.

• An amusing op-ed from Patrick Walker that appears at "OpEdNews.com", and as near as I can tell, nowhere else. Mr. Walker does stridency as only a true left-winger can:
  If Democrats are taking progressives' pulse after Obama's all-too-typical State of the Union address, they should be deeply troubled about their party's future. To put the matter in a nutshell, Democrats are now staking their electoral hopes on Elizabeth Warren's progressive message, but leaving presidential policy-making in the hands of corporate-owned faux progressives like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The result is that Obama and Clinton are forced (within the limits imposed by their corporate puppet-masters) to babble Warren's progressive rhetoric--while no serious progressive believes them for a heartbeat.

  In other words, when you make phony progressives your party's presidential face, you're pretty damn sure to lose face with progressives who are clearly the real deal. A brief but wide sampling of progressive reactions to Obama's SOTU address, culled from articles published on the Common Dreams website, forcefully illustrates just how little real progressives are buying Obama's threadbare progressive shtick. For those reactions, read here, here, here, and here. Even more scathingly skeptical is this response from the leftist Black Agenda Report.

  Elsewhere, Patrick reveals his dream Dem ticket would be Senators Warren and Sanders. I imagine just about every GOP pol would agree.

• A bit of amusement resulted from a Hugh Hewitt radio interview with Scott Walker. Hewitt brought up the issue of Walker's lack of a college degree. Walker's response:

  I say I’m like the majority of people in America. I’m someone who went to college, had the opportunity in my senior year to go and take a job full-time, which was not the only reason I went to college, but one of the biggest reasons was to get a job. And the American Red Cross offered me a job my senior year, and I took it, thinking someday, maybe, I’d go back. But a few years later, I met my wonderful wife, Tonette, a year after that, we had Matthew, the year after that, we had Alex. And now like a lot of folks in America, you know, your family and your job take the time away from you from finishing it up. But I don’t think anybody, and I’ve got a Master’s degree in taking on the big government special interests, and I think that is worth more than anything else that anybody can point to.

  Now I bolded five words there, but only because they seem to have been the only words heard by Mark E Andersen at the DailyKos. Who blustered:

  Gov. Walker was unable to finish college. There are plenty of websites and blogs out there full of accusations about why he left Marquette, but we're not exploring that today. This is about how he has the audacity to suggest that he has a master’s degree when he does not even have a bachelor’s degree.

  There's more at the link. Kids, the lesson here is: never let your bile-fueled hatred of a politician lead you to such public obtuse foolishness.

  The Twitchy kids accumulated a number of amusing tweets in response. A good one from a Pun Salad favorite:

  "Dr. Johnny Fever was not an MD!" #KOStantrums

  — Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) January 19, 2015