Mitt Romney and Ballot-Box Stuffing

Janet Folger continues her great coverage of the race for the GOP nomination. Apparently Mitt Romney is attempting to buy his way to victory. This is not very surprising since I’ve heard the rumors about him buying the CPAC, Ames and other straw polls. He does have the money to do it, after all. And if he is taking such dishonest shortcuts it does tend to cast a bad light on his character, or rather lack of it.

With that in mind, here’s a bit of Janet Folger’s latest column about Mitt’s latest “victory:”

There are now two major polls that put Gov. Mike Huckabee in a 5-to-1 lead among values voters: the Values Voter Presidential Debate and the Values Voter Summit.

Among summit attendees, who paid the registration, airfare and accommodations, and actually heard the candidates’ speeches, Gov. Huckabee won more votes than all the other candidates combined – including Mitt Romney. Huckabee earned 51 percent of the vote compared to Romney’s 10 percent, Fred Thompson’s 8 percent and Tom Tancredo’s 7 percent.

Isn’t that interesting? But isn’t Huck, like former candidate Sam Brownback, a longshot who can’t win? Hmmm.

Efforts to try and skew the results of the Internet poll, such as the e-mail sent by Mark DeMoss (now on the Romney campaign), complete with a link and instructions to stack it, gained Romney a .5 percent edge for his prominently announced “win.” By the way, when that announcement was made following fanfare, including a drum roll, the audience (who were 5-to-1 Huckabee supporters) sat stunned. Had they announced the results of the real grass-roots activists who actually attended the event, we would have heard explosive applause instead of the sound of crickets and the clapping of a few Romney shills.

That sound is the Republican party being flushed down the toilet. Sad, isn’t it? Something is awfully fishy about this process. Buy a few votes here and there and squeak out “victories” over the candidates that actual honest grass-roots activists prefer. People were right, Mitt’s a slick businessman. But is this good for our democracy? Is it good for the Republican party? Is this good for America? I’m not sure I like where it’s headed.

More people need to get involved at the grass-roots and take charge of the process, otherwise astroturf wins. And that means we all lose.

– Psycheout

Richard Land Gets It Right

The GOP had better not take evangelicals for granted. Many of us will throw the Republican party overboard if they dare to demand that we vote for Rudy Giuliani. Don’t believe me? Well, Richard Land, president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), a very influential voice of religious conservatives, makes it absolutely clear. And I applaud him for speaking out. Hot Air provides some key snippets from an interview with Newsweek. The entire interview is worthy of a read, so be sure to check it out.

NEWSWEEK: So we wanted to ask you, first of all, about the third party idea and whether it’s serious. A number of people are suggesting it is just a threat.

Land: My intuition [is that] this is not a bluff. If Giuliani is the nominee, there will be a third party. There are things that Giuliani could do to help mitigate the damage. But I have been in too many discussions over the last 15 years where evangelical leaders have said, “The one thing we will never allow to happen is for the Republican Party to take us for granted the way the Democrat Party too often takes the African-American community for granted.”
This is not a bluff…

NEWSWEEK: When Rudy says “I will appoint strict constructionist judges,” you are not hearing that?

Land: I hear it. I hear it.

NEWSWEEK: Well, you don’t hear Hillary saying that.

Land [turns to question a Newsweek reporter]: Could you vote for a Klansman?

[Reporter responds] No.

Land: You’ve answered my question. I cannot vote for someone who believes that it’s all right to stop a beating heart.

That’s absolutely right. The pro-life issue is simply non-negotiable. Hasn’t the Republican party learned this lesson yet? Will the GOP throw the 2008 Presidential election and all that social conservatives have worked for during the last several decades? They will do so at their peril. As Land says, “this is not a bluff.”  And evangelicals and socons cannot be blamed if this happens.  It’s up to the party to make the right choice.  We will not obediently submit if an intolerable candidate is selected.

Land also had some interesting things to say about Mitt Romney. If Mittens were nominated, it would not necessarily be a deal-breaker; it wouldn’t necessarily result in Richard Land and other evangelicals voting third party, but there are a number of concerns that potential voters would have. Mitt hasn’t done much, if anything, to qualm their fears.

What are the three or four things that he absolutely needs to say more vigorously?

For starters, he needs to quit trying to convince evangelicals that Mormonism is an orthodox, with a small “o,” Trinitarian, with a capital “T,” Apostolic, with a capital “A,” faith. He is not going to win that argument [and] he doesn’t need to try. That’s not the issue. Kennedy didn’t try to defend Catholicism. He defended the right of a Catholic to run for President. What I think Romney has to do is he has to give a speech in which he defends the right of a Mormon to run for president and appeals to Americans’ basic sense of fair play. I would encourage him to say that “there was no higher percentage of Mormons in my administration than there were Mormons in the percentage of the population in Massachusetts.”

That is a concern that has been expressed to me by my constituents–that he would have a disproportionate number of Mormons in his administration.

What did Romney say [when you suggested that]?

He said he would consider it. [But] he has not given that speech. I’ve seen him go to South Carolina and say things like, you know, “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.” Well, you know what, that ain’t going to work in South Carolina. The most generous description [evangelicals] will give [Mormonism] is the one that I give it, which is that it is the fourth Abrahamic religion, you know, Judaism being the first, Christianity being the second, and Islam being the third. And Joseph Smith plays the Mohammed figure in a fourth Abrahamic faith, but it is not a Trinitarian Christian faith.

Need I remind you that Mormonism isn’t Christian?

Brownbackers instinctively know that neither Giuliani nor Romney are acceptable; neither deserve their vote. If either choice is presented as the only one, they will look elsewhere: either third party or a write-in. You can count on it. This is no bluff.

See also: Rudy Giuliani: Soft on Child Molesters? Is this the kind of person that a President Giuliani would welcome into his cabinet?

– Psycheout

Hillary Clinton: Cat Hater

I received this urgent email today. It serves as a fine companion piece to Mitt Romney: Dog Hater. Apparently, it comes from The Times Online.

As the “first pet” of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed “chilly” Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today?

Cover your eyes, cat lovers.

Once the presidency was over, there was no room for Socks anymore. After years of loyal service at the White House, the black and white cat was dumped on Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, who also had an embarrassing clean-up role in the saga of his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky.

Aha! A pussy problem.

Some believe the abandoned pet could now come between Hillary Clinton and her ambition to return to the White House as America’s first female president.

Something has to.

Clinton’s treatment of Socks cuts to the heart of the questions about her candidacy. Is she too cold and calculating to win the presidency? Or does it signify political invincibility by showing she is willing to deploy every weapon to get what she wants?

Yes and no.

“In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the
top of the list,” writes Caitlin Flanagan in the current issue of The
Atlantic magazine. “But neither is it dead last, and it is especially
galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-
purpose character reference.”

Well, she is a feminazi.

Flanagan’s article, titled “No Girlfriend of Mine,” points out that
Clinton wrote a crowd-pleasing book “Dear Socks, Dear Buddy:
Kids’ Letters to the First Pets,” in which she claimed that only with
the arrival of Socks and his “toy mouse” did the White House
“become a home.”

So she threw him out at the first opportunity. Shrillary is no adherent to family values. Obviously.

Being Clinton, she also lectured readers that pets are an “adoption
instead of an acquisition” and warned them to look out for their
safety. (Buddy, the chocolate labrador in the Reagan White House,
bounded into a road soon after leaving the White House and was
promptly run over.)

Poor Buddy. He was a victim of circumstance. Socks, like Seamus, was a victim of a callous and calculating self-obsessed owner.

Finally the article ends with this heartbreaking bit of prose:

Perhaps the cautionary tale of Socks the cat will make a difference. “Hillary’s insistence that we follow her example in pet ownership, when she really should be on Cat Fancy’s Most Wanted List, makes her a tiresome bore,” Flanagan writes.

I think he meant “boar.” (tusks and all).

“But exploiting the emotions of good-natured people – well, that’s just another example of her three-decade-long drift from the girl she once was to the woman that circumstance and ambition have made her.”

Actually she was always that way. Shrillary and Mittens sitting in a tree….

If these craven politicians will do these things to their pets, what will they do to us? Just keep your catflap secured and vote no on these horrible phony people. They do not deserve our trust, they cannot be trusted with our vote.

So says Socks and Seamus.

– Psycheout