Perhaps. I foresee the GOP/Teatrolls and MSM going with the following narrative if Obama vetoes it:
“Obama is yet again exceeding his executive authority by continuing to fund and run a program that has not been duly funded by Congress. What’s more, he’s choosing to fund the program he likes, allowing the invasion from Mexico to continue, while refusing to fund the one he doesn’t like, you know, the one that protects us from his Muslim brethren.”
It doesn’t fucking matter what the details are. The GOP/Teatrolls are playing the optics game…it’s all they have left.
Precisely. Taking what both of you said together, what’s really going on here is that the GOP/Teatrolls are doing anything they fucking want, just like NCSteve said, and they will get away with it for two reasons: (a) abject failure on the part of the Dems to effectively play the messaging game and (b) the MSM will gleefully push this entire issue right through the false equivalence looking glass, treating the argument I predicted above (and whatever others the GOP/Teatrolls come up with) as a potentially true and equally legitimate argument and alternative to any other explanation, including the truth, that anyone attempts to message. The issue is too complicated for explanation messaging, but the Dems are already behind on the emotion messaging and optics messaging, because those trains already left the station. They seem to enjoy sitting idly by while the GOP/Teatrolls blatantly lays the groundwork for their arguments with preliminary, pre-emptive messaging, and then only bother to start trying to combat it all once the shit’s out of the dog…and you can’t put the shit back in the fucking dog. Here, any" backfire" will do no long-term damage because the Dems disarmed themselves…they showed up to the knife fight with a spoon, per usual…and I question whether it will do any short-term damage when nobody is going to understand just how fraudulent the GOP/Teatrolls’ messaging is about Obama vetoing it. What they will see, and what the MSM will assist the GOP/Teatroll in presenting to them, is Obama continuing to run the hated program, favoring immigrants, while the uber-necessary program that protects us from the bogeyman flounders, because something something secret Muslim POTUS.
I wonder whose staffer came up with the lame notion that by shutting down the Dept. of Homeland Security, they could thwart the POTUS? And then the clown car shifted into gear and all the clowns started bellowing like a herd of jackasses, hanging out the windows and showing themselves. And yes, John Tanning Bed Boner --I’m talking about you.
And you think B.O. didn’t know how the deal works? Of course he knew. He just gave them enough rope to hang themselves. So now Steve King apparently has a staffer who managed to drag himself to the Congressional library and look up the facts, after the budget’s been passed with this useless little caveat they were so proud and boistrous to include, and lo! I mean Yikes! The ignorant bunch of fools find themselves hoist on their own petard, right in front of God and everybody else!
So this is the level of stupidity the ruling party is laboring beneath, and we, too, are laboring under their stupidity, and will be for some time to come. They control both houses of Congress, they control more state legislatures and state houses than before and it’s all run by stupid. We are so screwed.
One huge advantage that Republicans have over Democrats is that after losing an election Republicans focus on winning the next election while Democrats fret over why they can’t win the next election.
The GOP simply can’t avoid the mistake of acting as if the election gave them a mandate. They can’t think things through because all of them want to prove a point of how conservative they are so the donor funds keep rolling in. All democrats need to do is remind the public how they keep avoiding tackling the immigration reform issue.
Seven words or fewer? From the party of Hubert Humphrey? Hahahahahahahaha gasp Hahahahahahahaha!
I agree with you. Republicans understand marketing and advertising in a way Democrats simply don’t and can’t because so few Democratic apparatchiks have any personal or family experience with trying to sell a product whereas many of the Republican apparatchiks are on loan from (or heirs to) private businesses.
Republicans send their spokesbots out to news shows armed with a sheet of talking points to repeat over and over again where the Democrat on the show actually think they’re there to have a substantive policy discussion. And when they try to stop doing that and focus on messaging instead, they end up sounding stilted and ridiculous because their talking points are being written by policy wonks instead of people with experience in the black arts of flackery. It’s like Ezra Klein vs. Frank Luntz.
And don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with advertising–just more or less semi-honest commerce–but I hate flacks, and in particular the D.C. “black” P.R. firms you’ve never heard of, like poison. The idea of hiring those people to work on messaging the way they hire tech people to do tech makes me cringe and I don’t expect it would be a very fruitful partnership. But we have to do something.
To my mind, the biggest problem is that our millionaire pundits and reporters are literally incapable of recalling anything that happened more than three weeks earlier. And stuff that happened before last Friday grows hazier by the second.
Like, remember when they ignored the Downing Street Memo because it was “old news” and stuff that “everybody already knew” even though they had never once reported it? Ultimately, the blogs managed to push it onto their radar screens, but god they did it grudgingly, and only once they dimly sensed that their remaining credibility was threatened. That’s how it goes. It’s like they have a form of brain damage that inhibits the formation of long term memories. By next January, nothing they did this year will take up so much as a neuron in Chuckie Todd and Jake Tapper’s heads.
To be honest, I think your reasoning about King applies equally to the MSM: it’s not ignorance nor memory encoding problems, but rather deliberate, willful, self-serving avarice.
Wow. I guess it’s a cold day in hell because I actually understand and agree with Rep. Steve King! When did he wise up and see the folly of his colleagues’ moves?
I thouroughly enjoy seeing the republicons tryin to do as much damage to the president and this country and all the while they continue to step on their own dicks…please proceed republicons I need the laugh
Agreed this is a terrible picture, reminds me of an infant in diapers who has just filled it up with something and is feeling so much better, but to know we’ll see so many more as he gets progressively more orange every day fills me despair.
Your post is exactly true of midterm elections, but not presidential election years. I honestly can’t figure out why that is.
Spot on! You see this so often. Democrats go on these shows trying to engage in intelligent debate with starving grizzly bears, and they are shocked, SHOCKED every time the bear rips their face off. Democrats are so caught up trying to explain the nuance and high mindedness of their policy prescriptions that they completely lose their audience. Speak plain, keep your answers simple, stop acting like the American people aren’t morons, and get genuinely mad. Also, when a Republican has a stupid idea point out that it’s a stupid idea.
