It Gives You an Erection, It Wins the Election

This is a timely and amusing distraction. All you need to see is Wolfie’s hint that OKC was anything other than an act of domestic terrorism (hint: all the way at the end) to be reminded how utterly fiendish – and criminal – the last batch were.

Is the joke about fathering five sons?

Shoot first pay for dinner.

Fox — Fox! — has Obama up by 5 among likely voters.

Setting aside my routine disparagement of horse-race polls, there’s also this:

The poll finds the president has a significant advantage on most issues and candidate traits. Voters trust Obama more than Romney on foreign policy (+15 points), education (+14 points), Medicare (+11 points), health care (+9 points) and terrorism (+8 points).

Foreign policy +15 — before last night’s news.

@nojo:
Factor in Faux’s number jigging favoring the GOPer candidate. It’s not looking good for the Mittbot

@ManchuCandidate: The truly surprising stat was “likely voters” — which commonly translates as “people who voted in the last election”, or 2010.

Off-year elections favor conservatives (who bother to vote), and pollsters typically switch to “likely” from “registered” after Labor Day. I’ve been expecting the polling to tighten, based on those facts alone.

Might still. Just not yet.

@nojo: Agreed in the sense that polls taken before the last debate mean nothing.

@nojo:
I suspect that Mittens is killing any enthusiasm for Mittens and there is some serious panic in the Mittens camp right now.

@blogenfreude: Actually, they mean a lot — just not individually. And not the horse-race.

It’s the trend of the state-by-state polling over the past six months that tells the story: Romney can’t depend on more than 200 solid electoral votes, Obama cruises (a little bumpier) around 250. (Counting the statistical ties gives Obama the landslide right now.)

Simply put: Romney can’t get a grip, which is why he’s flailing, and why he hasn’t been able to Etch-a-Sketch himself to the center. You saw similar trends over Summer 2008, which is why McCain desperately chose Palin: He had no alternative.

But the horse-race polls tell the media story: It’s fun to pile onto a loser! Which they’re doing.

@ManchuCandidate: I’m surprised nobody’s brought up Bob Dole yet — they’re all fixated on 2004 or 1992 or 1980 or [insert other election here].

Dole was tanking in 1996, rats were deserting the sinking ship, and Republicans were hoping to God he wouldn’t drag them down with him. We haven’t quite reached that moment yet — but we did see a lot of arse-covering earlier this week, once the Obama Convention Bounce couldn’t be denied.

Legal Insurrection Wingnut was right to tar Peggy Noonan with the “circular firing squad” epithet today, and we’ll likely see more of it as Repugs run for cover. But I’d give that one another couple weeks — it’s not Undeniably Hopeless just yet.

@nojo:
No one likes to think of the times things got all fucked up, but RWers rarely do.

Judging by what I read (of others work looking at RW wingnut blogs) the delusion is starting to build up. The shrieking has begun.

Pegs did initiate the Circular firing squad, but it was a few months building. I would like to think this starts the war between the money and the teabaggers and the religoids, but I guess that is more wishful thinking at this point.

Elsewhere, Fallows calls it Mitt’s 3 a.m. phone call. That one didn’t cross my mind.

@Beggars Biscuit: That’s not Rumsfeld’s handwriting? I don’t know why I would think I recognized it but …

@karen marie still has her eyes tight shut: I think you are right – I just assumed it was the same writer as the first note, by Wolfowitz. But the handwriting is different. Same conclusion, however. Even worse – new meaning to “SecDeaf”.

The difference between Obama & Romney:

Obama, “Make no mistake, justice will be done.”

Romney, “The first response of the United States must be outrage.”

@jaycubed: Which explains a lot about the Right/Teabag/Conservative/Christian/Republican desire to bomb the crap out of anyone who fails to toe the Big Money line. I think they simply believe that because to them money is the ultimate carrot and stick, people who don’t respond appropriately are literally an outrage. Mitt is attempting to respond to behavior that must seem as alien to his mind as Dick Cheney’s seems to me. It absolutely doesn’t compute.

@nojo: I had so completely forgotten about Bob Dole that I had to wiki him to see if he was still alive.

He is. (But Jack Kemp is not.)

It turns out that ole Bobby is running something called the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: Looking at the 1996 Gallup trends, Bubba was often leading Dole by twenty points, which is probably why he doesn’t come to mind for most folks. So my comparison is more intuitive than rational — Dole’s ship wasn’t just leaking, there was a huge hole in the hull.

Still, I’m going to keep the comparison for the next couple weeks. The point, for me, is what happened once everybody faced the Inevitable.

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ:

Bob Dole has been the butt of one of my favorite jokes for a decade now.

What kind of underwear does Bob Dole wear?

. . . . . . . . . . . Depends.