Jamelle Bouie's review of Romney's Big Speech is palpably angry. It's actually pretty awesome, because it's easy to get jaded as a journalist and political writer, but once in awhile, someone lies so gleefully, with so little regard for reality, that it can return you to that state of rage at the sheer immorality of it all. Romney spoke pure Conservatese, and they've grown so used to lying that actual truths would sound strange in their mouths. Still, the audacity of Romney's bullshit was dazzling....and enraging. Jamelle explains the reality:

The other thing was less remarked upon at the time, but no less important: Congressional Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, pledged to make Obama a one-term president by any means necessary. Their plan was to use legislative rules like the filibuster to create a supermajority requirement for everything from confirming nominees to passing new legislation. Far from harming Republicans—who would be unified in their opposition—the blowback would tarnish Obama, who would be blamed by the public for gridlock and obstruction......

Worse, the sudden reversal of Republicans on the issue of fiscal stimulus—which they supported at both ends of the Bush administration—meant that the economy was stuck without further support, even as it stagnated with slow growth and high unemployment. Obama, as the president, received the lion's share of blame from the public. The only people who noticed Republican obstruction, by contrast, were assorted bloggers, journalists, and Washington insiders.

If you read this history and really think about it, it's hard to escape the creeping dread that it may be impossible to save this country with simple reforms. Progressives like to focus on campaign finance reform---which is an important issue, don't get me wrong---but I honestly don't think that the money is the most important issue when it comes to electoral politics. I know that's blasphemy to say, but hear me out. I think one reason it's intoxicating to focus on campaign finance reform is that as unlikely as it is to pass massive reforms that actually matter, it's still possible. And it's absolutely important, so it becomes this focal point. 

But at the end of the day, the real problem with this country is that one of our political parties not only doesn't give a shit about the stability of this country, and in fact has powerful incentives to dismantle it. It's both an ideological thing---stability is dependent on more equality, which they oppose above all other things---but it's also a political thing, which they've come to realize. Republicans have been kept in check in the past by fear that if they destroy this country, they have to pay a major price for it. But it seems what they've learned from the Bush debacle is that if they destroy this country, all they have to do is make sure the Democrats can't fix it properly, and then they can blame the Democrats and return to power to deliver more destruction. There's no incentive to behave, and many incentives to tear shit up. 

This strikes me as a problem that can't be fixed with gumption or policy reform. Campaign finance reform can only go so far, because Republicans just need to hold on to enough seats to be obstructionist when they're out of power to make the system work. And those seats they get because the voters have powerful fears regarding women's power and people of color making gains. The rest just works itself out. The only thing I see fixing all this is for the country itself to change enough that people stop voting for Republicans in sufficient numbers. Which may happen naturally, as demographic changes make the country more liberal, but I don't know that it can be fixed with the usual reformist approach. 

Still, the nice thing about politics is there's always some chaos afoot. For instance, Republicans put all this effort into creating the perfect situation for getting the country to blame Obama for their problems, and voting for the generic Republican candidate. And then they nominated a robot who scares people. Not a slick move, though I suppose we watched months of them trying to to bargain their way out of it. By no means am I saying this is over; I think Obama's campaign skills are formidable. But the long term situation is scary, since the dynamic isn't going to change. It's only going to be changed when the voters stop falling for the bait-and-switch. 

There's been a lot of speculation that Romney, now that he's the general election candidate, is going to run more to the center now that he's finally over the Santorum hump. That's basic common sense and a typical pattern in most elections, but there are some folks who are dissenting and saying that Romney is going to be the exception to the rule. Paul Waldman lays out the case:

One of the many differences between Bush and Romney is that conservatives trusted Bush. Even if he presented himself as "a different kind of Republican" (i.e. one who wasn't so cruel when it came to social issues), they knew that he was one of them. There was no doubt in their minds about where Bush stood on most things, and on most things he was with them. With Romney, they'll doubt everything.

He goes on to explain that because of this concern, Romney is going to be constantly pushed around by conservatives, and really unable to distance themselves from him without creating a backlash in right wing media. Honestly, we can only hope, because I'm still pretty certain that conservatives are better at falling in line than liberals typically give them credit for. (It's the "everyone else is like me" problem; liberals don't fall in line very easily, so we assume that's true of conservatives, but it's not.) Still, there's now evidence for Waldman's theory:

Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr. announced today that Gov. Mitt Romney will address Liberty University graduates at the 2012 Commencement ceremony to be held at 10 a.m. on Saturday, May 12, at Arthur L. Williams Stadium.

“We are delighted that Governor Romney will join us to celebrate Commencement with Liberty’s 2012 graduates," said Liberty Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr. "This will be a historic event for Liberty University reminiscent of the visits of Governor, and then presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan to Liberty’s campus in 1980 and of President George H.W. Bush who spoke at Liberty’s 1990 Commencement ceremony.”

Of course, making an allegiance to Liberty is a big part of the standard Republican campaign, but it seems to me that it's more politically toxic of a move than it was in the past. Before, Liberty didn't really make the news much, despite being founded by Jerry Falwell, and so it was a good opportunity to pander to the Christian right without really getting the notice of the mainstream. But the Bush administration was heavily staffed by people who went to these fundie universities, drawing attention to how they're basically shoddy places that don't offer real education, but instead are about indoctrination. 

I simply have to imagine that Romney really doesn't want to have to go kiss the Falwell ring, but he feels he has no choice. Which is good news, actually, because it suggests he's genuinely afraid that many fundamentalist Christians would rather stay home than vote for a Mormon. If that's true, then two things are also true: 1) He won't be able to stop trying to win them over and 2) a lot of them will sit this one out anyway. Fundies are notoriously hard to budge once they've got an idea in their head, and those who already think Romney is too much of the Other to be voted for are probably not going to change their minds. The only real question, then, is how many of them are seriously that wary of Romney. I'm skeptical that it's a high number, but this decision from Romney's camp suggests they believe that it's high enough. 

Steve Kornacki has a rundown of different primary races where a losing candidate was able to make life hell for the eventual nominee, with an eye towards the possibility that this may not be the end of Santorum's influence on this race, particularly with regards to dragging Romney to the right. I'm even more skeptical after reading the history of situations where this did happen. In pretty much every situation, the challenger had a belligerent personality. Santorum is an asshole, but he strikes me as a bit too much of a conformist quislling to really mount a post-loss challenge to Romney. Part of the reason I think this is that he dropped out a bit suddenly; a real brawler would have carried his nickel and dime delegates to the convention. That he's dropped out shows he really did think he was in it to win it, and not that's out of his grasp, I don't really see what benefit he would get from continuing to be a pain in Romney's side. He barely campaigned at times as it was. Unless you can convince him that god has chosen him to bother Romney, I suspect Santorum fades into the background. 

I'm not happy about this situation, mind you. I think the country is better off when more conservatives with verbal diarrhea have access to the microphone. The number one problem with modern conservatism is that most conservatives are adept at disingenuous rhetoric that allows them to promote classist, sexist and racist ideals without coming right out and saying what they mean. Someone who has a compulsion to talk in public like they do behind closed doors can help bring some air to the situation, and make it that much harder for a motivated public to continue pretending not to see what's obvious about conservatism. That's why I'm annoyed about the firing of John Derbyshire; it allows everyone else who said basically the same thing in slightly less obnoxious language to carry on as if they're not racist, because you know, they fired the racist. And that's why I'm sad Santorum is out so soon. His unvarnished misogyny and tendency to get very close in public to saying blatantly racist things that he and his buddies say behind closed doors was clarifying. It was eroding the Republican brand by the day, which is probably why get got out.

Now that Romney is rid of him, he has nearly 7 months to wash the wingnut stink off him, and present himself as a moderate Republican. That may not sound like a long time right now, but in politics it's huge. As much fun as it is to watch pouty-faced idiot Santorum throw in the towel in a snit, I'm really sorry that he's not hanging in until August. The voters that swing elections tend to be low-information ones, after all, and they don't really start tuning in until the fall. A lot of them will only vaguely understand that there was a primary contest to begin with, much less have an idea of how radically right wing Romney had to be in order to save himself in it. Which sucks, because if nothing else, Santorum's overt hostility to women meant that questions about women's rights to health care and contraception particularly were being asked pretty regularly, which hurt Romney. He couldn't support that stuff without losing votes to Santorum in the primary, after all. Now that Santorum is gone, Romney can probably start being far more pro-contraception. He may even cut out the attacks on Planned Parenthood. Which means he might be able to close the gender gap that's opened up in the polls.

I don't want to be Debbie Downer, but I just don't see how Santorum's departure plays out any other way. 

Well, I think we're on the next and final phase of conservatives trying to find a narrative that allows them to conduct all-out war on women while denying that's what they're doing: I'm rubber and you're glue. I'm a bit surprised they didn't latch on to this strategy sooner, honestly, since the ways of the petulant 5-year-old have always had tremendous appeal for those who classify themselves as "real Americans". That the strategy requires heavy use of the non sequitur is considered no bar to using it.

Example #1:

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Monday pushed back against claims that Republicans were attacking women's rights and insisted that the "real war on women" was being directed by President Barack Obama.

"The real war on women is being conducted by the regime, by the Obama administration," he explained. "Since Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate for women has gone up from 7 to 8.1 percent. ... The poverty rate among women rose to 14.5 percent last year, up from 13.9 percent when Obama was immaculated."

Since this attack is being directed by someone who appears to believe that Obama was "immaculated" instead of what really happened---he won a national election with a stunningly high percentage of the vote for these polarizing times---I suppose it will have traction with those who are as delusional as he. But even then, this is all a garbled mess. Let's not even deal with the factual error, which of course is blaming the economic problems of the Bush administration on Obama. Let's deal with the fact that in order to rationalize a war on women that's being conducted in large part to keep women from competing economically with men, conservatives have resorted to pretending they give a shit about women's economic wellbeing. The two major planks of the war on women are ultimately about keeping women economically dependent on men, which in turn conservatives hope will keep the power balance at home in favor of men. First, there's the attempts to take away a woman's right to control when she gives birth, which is ultimately about economics. Women who lose that control fare poorly in the job market, unable to structure their career in a way that allows them to move up like a man can, which in turn can allow women to exercise more power in the home, with men losing the "but I make  more money, so I'm owed more service and decision-making power" excuse. Additionally, women hobbled by unwanted child-bearing can't compete economically with men, which means people who are uncomfortable with female power in the workplace are going to support forced child-bearing. 

The second plank of the war on women is to directly attack women's right to equal pay for equal work. That's why the Supreme Court ruled against Lilly Ledbetter, and that's why Gov. Scott Walker just repealed equal pay protections in his state. In order of the high unemployment gambit to work, two things have to happen: 1) The facts have to be shoved aside. (The fact is that the unemployment crisis is on President Bush, and Obama's efforts blunted it.) 2) The listener has to simulataneously get angry that women are unemployed while eagerly supporting policies that hurt women economically on purpose, because they don't want women to do well. Now, wingnuts are perfectly capable of that level of cognitive dissonance, but I don't see how that attack crosses the barrier into the mainstream. Functionally, Limbaugh is saying, "Don't look at those of us trying to destroy women economically because women aren't doing well economically, though better than they would if we were in charge, so if you support women, support those of us who are actively out to destroy them." 

In contrast, the claim that the "real racists" are people who oppose racism because they notice racism seems like it nearly makes sense. 

Because of the tortured logic of the "I'm rubber, you're glue" strategy, Fox decided just to skip even trying to make an argument. This the headline of example #2:

But if you read the actual article---which is about as hysterical and pointless as the headline would suggest---there is literally not a single word about the supposed war on women that Obama is suddenly conducting. No mention of wage equality, reproductive rights, women's wellbeing at all. In fact, there's no mention in the text of the article of women. The word "women" doesn't appear in the text. Nor "woman", nor "female". Not even "girl". The comments suggest that super wingnuts are making connections---they believe Muslims hate women, and they believe Obama is a secret Muslim, and that therefore that's all you need to know---but again, not enough there to jump the mainstream media line. 

Ironically, there is something the Obama administration has done that conservatives could howl about if they wanted to score some "both sides" points that would be embraced by a mainstream media eager to embrace that narrative regardless of the facts. Conservatives could point to the preposterous Plan B decision. Of course, doing so would be a tacit embrace of the notion that women have reproductive rights, even after a man has "claimed" their body by ejaculating in it. However, that women lose their human rights once they have sex with a man is the fundamental belief they're pushing here, so I'm guessing they're going to sidestep that easy hit.

I'm thrilled that women's rights are a front-and-center issue this campaign season, but it does come with an excrutiating price tag: Conservatives bloviating about how they looooooove "strong women". This is a standard talking point that Republicans trot out when they're called out for anti-feminism. At its core, it's a nonsensical claim and works more as a distraction than a real argument. The image of the steel magnolia---a woman who dispatches her responsibilities with ease, who has a lot of energy and occasionally is sassy to her husband, because she's far more competent than he---has a lot of emotional resonance, for conservatives, as well as feminists. Feminists admire the Joan Holloway type for her survival skills, because we know exactly how hard it is to survive in a system that is designed to make you fail no matter what you do. Conservatives love the "strong woman" image for an entirely different reason: Because the existence of these women means we don't need feminism, in their minds. The underlying argument of, "I don't hate women. I love strong women," is that we need patriarchy as a sort of litmus test for which women are deserving and which are not. If you can live under a system where you're a second class citizen, where you get paid less for equal work, where you don't have reproductive rights, and where men have a lot of personal power over you---and you can still get out of bed every day, put on your lipstick, and get shit done? Well, you've done proved you're a "strong woman". Here's a Mother's Day card as a reward, and remember, you don't need no stupid feminism. Just don't ask any hard questions about why men aren't tested this way.

Of course, there is a teeny bit of kinda feminism in the conservative wanking about "strong women". The celebrants of "strong women" are willing to go way out on a limb and allow that their favored form of female not be burned at the stake for her scary mouthiness. Conservatives love to pat themselves on the back for believing that the 19th amendment shouldn't be repealed or for allowing that some women may be allowed to draw a salary under some circumstances, and then get all faux-outraged when feminists say the vote is great, but it's really not enough. (We gave you the vote! How dare you actually use it for something, you stupid bitches, er, strong women?) I have a couple of examples from the campaign trail that have amused me.

Example #1: Rick Santorum is trying to suggest he doesn't hate women just because he believes their god-given role is to spend 30 years of their lives constantly pregnant. He's deploying his wife to defend him against charges of misogyny, since that's become women's work in Republican circles. 

Her argument is that Rick loves---you guessed it---strong women. Women with the strength to stand on two legs! Especially women who develop healthy pelvic muscles so that they don't have to wear pee pads all the time even after baby 8 or 10. By god, he's going to let her go back to work after all her kids are grown, which will be some time in her 70s, a well-known time in a woman's life when employers are scrambling over themselves to hire her for that resume with a 40-year gap in it. Did she mention that he supports her right to vote, because she votes for him? Who the fuck needs feminism?

But Rick Santorum is hardly the only man crowing about how his love of "strong women" means he doesn't have to answer for his votes against women's rights. Scott Brown has taken a hit for misogynist behavior and policy, and so he pulled the "strong woman" card out to argue against needing that stupid feminism stuff.

Brown was introduced at the press conference by his wife, former Boston television reporter Gail Huff.

Huff wasn't actively involved in the campaign that led to Brown's 2010 special election win to the seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy, but said she's able now to be more involved since she's no longer a reporter in Boston.

Brown said he's used to being surrounded by "strong willed women" and Huff said the family, including Brown and the couple's two daughters Ayla and Arianna, have open discussions around the kitchen table.

"The girls, now that they are 23 and 21, have very, very specific ideas about what they do and don't believe and they chime in with a lot of great ideas, and it's wonderful for both of us to be able to bounce things off of them because their generation sees things very differently," Huff said.

Brown declined to be more specific about the family discussions, but when a reporter asked Huff to name an issue that she and the couple's daughter have educated Brown on, Brown chimed in and said "how to cook."

"Yeah, how to cook, how to sew, how to clean," Huff added.

So let's see here. Brown deserves a cookie because he believes women are permitted to have political opinions, though he won't go so far as to suggest that anyone do something foolish like listen to those opinions. Women having opinions on politics is a lot like letting a kid repeat the plot of the movie he just saw to you: You let them rattle on because it's cute that they're trying, but they're not really ready to be Roger Ebert or anything. 

But that doesn't mean women don't get to know stuff! I mean, they know how to cook and how to clean and even how to sew! They are so strong. Even in a world where the men around them think of them as slightly dim children who can't be trusted with grown-up stuff like reproductive rights, they get up in the morning and get those stubborn eggs into that heavy frying pan. They are so strong! And feminism is trying to take that away, ladies. They want you to forsake the condescending head pats from men who think you're stupid, and replace those head pats with equality and respect. Which sounds good on paper, but you know what happens then, right? No more head pats. Are you sure you can give that up? 

Steve Kornacki at Salon has a piece up about Mitt Romney's continuing inability to win over evangelical voters. Personally, I'm not surprised evangelical Republicans are refusing to crown Romney the nominee. They were fed George W. Bush in 2000, and that led them to believe that they are the owners of the party, and Romney securing the nomination sends a strong signal that they aren't, and that the Republicans are primarily a pro-business party above all other things. The evangelical base is pro-capitalism, don't get me wrong, but they also believe, with reason, that capitalism may not be enough to preserve male dominance, gay oppression, and white supremacy. The reason they're so loud when calling Obama a "socialist" is because they're trying to convince themselves.  A black President does a lot to shake their confidence that capitalism alone will fulfill their goals, and his general pro-feminist and pro-gay leanings don't help. Now, more than ever, they want to vote for someone that reads as one of their tribe, like Bush did. Romney simply doesn't.

It's not a single thing. The Mormon thing doesn't help, but I think a different Mormon who emulated fundie culture better would perform better for them. But it's also that Romney does seem like a rich banker who finds all that culture war shit a distraction. (I'm not actually sure that he does, though his flip-flopping on these issues does suggest that he may not personally care that much. Which isn't to say that he wouldn't be a warrior on culture issues if he won. As Molly Ivins liked to say, you gotta dance with the one that brung ya'.) Also, it's important to remember that we're talking about culture warriors here. Culture warriors talk a big game about "values", but often you find that things like what you eat and how you talk actually matter more than these so-called "values". Santorum and Gingrich give a good impression of people who think going to Applebee's is a find way to spend an evening, and Romney simply doesn't. Which, I think, explains why this stuff doesn't matter:

But now that he’s regularly getting crushed by Rick Santorum, a Roman Catholic from Pennsylvania, the depths of Romney’s evangelical problem have come into focus. The question is what, exactly, it is that makes him so objectionable to Christian conservatives.

Santorum's Catholicism is the great red herring of this primary season. He disagrees with the Pope on more issues than he agrees with him on. Where he does agree with the Pope, it's because the Pope agrees with evangelical Christians, mainly on the question of whether or not women are full human beings with full human rights. (Both the Catholics and the evangelicals say no.) Santorum is, culturally speaking, an evangelical. When he denies global warming, it feels sincere; you really do get the impression that he can't believe that those muckety-muck scientists think they know better than he does just because they do stupid stuff like study and understand an issue. He also grasps that threatening to rain weapons down on Iran is a good ploy, because the evangelical base is nostalgic for the Crusades. He is also a full-throated supporter of theocracy, whereas Romney still has cultural memory of his family being hounded for their faith, and isn't reliable on this. You just get the impression that Gingrich or Santorum enjoys needling someone who orders the vegetarian entree, but Romney seems like someone who doesn't know he's supposed to go into a rage when he has to press 1 for English. Sure, Romney will pass economic policies that fuck the poor and working class, but they just feel entitled to that and oh so much more.

Even though I suspect the base knows that Romney will owe them if he wins, and will give them what they want, it's just about more than that. They want reassurance that they are the dominant class in America, and that their culture is winning. So they need someone who feels authentically like a full member of the tribe. They need someone whose resentments feel real, who devotion to ignorance feels absolute, and whose misogyny runs bone-deep. Not like that paternalistic misogyny of the banking class Romneys of the world, but the spittle-flinging anger at women that Limbaugh delivers and seems to be crawling right under Santorum's skin. Religion's relevance to this is that it's a quick shorthand for these more important, but difficult to articulate values. But in and of itself, religion isn't that meaningful. It's a tool, not the goal. 

Through the sheer, persistent incompetence of every Republican campaign, the GOP primary will never, ever end.

Rick Santorum was already known as starting from a deficit, delegate-wise, in Ohio. He failed to qualify for any district delegates in three Ohio congressional districts because he didn't turn in delegate names there.

But his delegate troubles go deeper. According to the Ohio Republican Party tonight, the former Pennsylvania U.S. senator filed incomplete delegate slates in six additional Ohio districts.

Altogether, this means Santorum, who until this week had a fair lead in polls in the Republican nominating race, could be ineligible for 18 Ohio district delegates.

Ohio has 66 delegates total, 63 at stake next Tuesday. The candidate with the most delegates wins. Santorum therefore goes into the Ohio primary election with a 29 percent deficit.

One reason that Romney is likely to be a much weaker nominee than he should be is because he can't beat the incompetently run and underfunded Santorum and Gingrich campaigns, despite months of demonstrated inability on their parts to string together a competent message or structure beyond a week or two. Santorum can't win almost a third of Ohio's delegates. That's the sort of thing the vanity campaign of a candidate who never polled above one percent does, not the guy who's been an arguable frontrunner for the past few weeks.

Romney will win the nod this year because he ran the least awful campaign. "Least awful" is the standard you use for buying kitchen utensils at a dollar store, not for nominating the figurehead of a major political party. 

Oh, congressional Republicans. There were two ways you could have reacted when Obama gave you what you said you wanted, which was to allow Catholic hospitals and universities not to cover contraception directly for their employees. You could have accepted the compromise gracefully and let it go, or double down and demand that any employer any time be able to cut employees off from health insurance benefits they've already earned, and in doing so, continue the national conversation about contraception that puts you into Camp Anti-Pill. You chose the latter, because your blinding misogyny made you unable to see that this might not be for the best. Thus, the Blunt amendment. Let's take a tally of how that worked out for you.

1) It kept contraception on the radar, which gave the mainstream media plenty of time and opportunity to make it clear that Rick Santorum is an anti-contraception nut who, if elected, would almost surely do everything in his power to keep women from getting access to contraception.

2) It forced Mitt Romney to set the land record in flip-flopping, first defending a woman's right to use contraception and then back-tracking and saying, no, actually, you think her employer should get a vote when it comes to how she conducts her private sex and reproductive life.

3) It revealed to the world that your party thinks it's appropriate to exclude female voices from a discussion about women's health care.

4) It set your most popular spokesman, Rush Limbaugh, on a multi-week rant about how 99% of American women are "sluts" and "prostitutes".

5) It'll probably be a factor in Scott Brown and Olympia Snowe's seats turning blue.

6) It made those in the media who apologize for your anti-choice views realize that actually, this really was about sex all along and  had nothing to do with fetuses.

7) It made you the butt of jokes from "Saturday Night Live", "Funny or Die", Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert.

8) And then the amendment that all this effort was put behind died with a whimper on the Senate floor. 

Excellent performance, GOP! I think, if you can keep up doing good work like this, sweeping victories in November are sure to be yours. 

Right now, Mitt Romney is two people. Romney #1 is the Romney that nearly got the nomination sewed up and wants to start running against Obama. That Romney was the one that came out when he was asked about the Blunt amendment yesterday afternoon:

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Unfortunately, the journalist misrepresented the bill. The Blunt Amendment is about a lot more than contraception; it would allow an employer to deny an employee any coverage for any "moral or religious" reason through the health insurance after it's been relinquished to the employee as compensation. Functionally, it's no different than an employer denying you the right to spend your salary on beer or condoms, if they disapprove, and it's closing in on giving the employer the right to require you to tithe to their church as a condition of your employment. Remember, the insurance coverage being debated here is yours. You paid for it, with a combination of labor and often cash. Giving an employer a right to dictate what care is covered is like giving your employer a right to live in your house because you used money they gave you in exchange for work to buy it.

This is part of a long tradition on the American right of demanding the right to control others while characterizing it as "freedom". It goes right back to slave owners claiming that the federal government was encroaching on their freedom to own others, i.e. their freedom to deprive others of all freedom. Now the argument is that for employers to be "free", they should have the right to deprive their employees of the freedom to use earned benefits as we see fit. Once the right to continue controlling compensation after it's been relinquished to the employee is established, I fully expect them to run rampant and start eyeballing control of wages next. After all, they're claiming that it's still "their" money, even after they sign the check!

I suspect Romney realized the public at large doesn't want your boss trying to control your private medical decisions because he has a prurient interest in your sex life---an interest that, if expressed in other ways, would get you hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit---and so he answered this way. In fact, Romney framed his answer in the "keep your boss out of your bedroom" way:

I’m not for the bill. But, look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there.

An hour later, the other Romney---the one who wants Santorum to quit collecting delegates and threatening his assurance of getting the nomination---came out. And that Romney said, "Well, the base thinks only women will be affected by this, and only women will have their boss in their bedroom and in their doctor's office, trying to make their decisions for them."  And the base really doesn't think women should be free, since they use that freedom to have the evil, evil sex. (Of course, the base doesn't realize that this law would give the boss the right to be in the bedrooms and doctor's offices of male employees, as well.) So that Romney, the one who wants to put Santorum away permanently, said this:

“Regarding the Blunt bill, the way the question was asked was confusing," a spokesman told TPM. "Governor Romney supports the Blunt Bill because he believes in a conscience exemption in health care for religious institutions and people of faith.”

I'm usually skeptical of the argument that a long primary hurts the candidate's general election prospects, but this year is special. In order to win the nomination, Romney has to be on the record supporting the idea that your boss gets a say in your medical decisions and you sex life when you're off the clock. That's probably not going to be a popular opinion.

The news is all abuzz today over the fact that Santorum "lost" the Catholic vote in the primaries last night. It's a construction that assumes that it was his to lose, and is based in one of the most pernecious myths of the Beltway media, which is that America is a sectarian society where "people of faith" not only vote according to religious guidelines, but according to those set by the loudest sectarians amongst them. Thus, you get claims that Obama is going to lose the "Jewish vote" because, I dunno, something about Israel, even though he really hasn't done a damn thing to hurt Israel. And now there's a growing adherence to the nonsensical belief that Catholics are a voting bloc, and one that votes primarily based on what a bunch of right wing celibates who spend all their time on TV denouncing vaginas think. The only group that doesn't get this treatment is mainline Protestants, because as the mainstream media doesn't tend to think of "white" as a race so much as a baseline, so it thinks of mainline Protestantism as the norm by which you measure others against. (On that basis alone, I enjoyed Santorum saying mainline Protestants aren't real Christians, because it actually jolted the media into realizing that various Protestants are also religious groups, just like Jews, Catholics, evangelicals, and Mormons.)  

But really, this nonsense about the "Catholic vote" has got to stop. There's literally no evidence for such a thing. Most Catholics are pro-choice and use birth control, and they do so in roughly the same numbers as non-Catholics. In fact, they're indistinguishable from the public at large in their voting habits. There's perhaps a slim chance that some of them were moved against Santorum by the JFK comment, but honestly, I'm skeptical. The reason is that we're talking about a Repubilcan primary. I guarantee their identity as Republicans was a bigger factor for Catholic Republicans voting in the primary than their loyalty to the only Catholic President. 

Ironically, Rick Santorum is a perfect example of why this supposition that Catholics are following Vatican marching orders when they vote is just completely off-base. Santorum's hardline stance on contraception is presumed, incorrectly, to stem from his devotion. In fact, like with other conservative Catholics, the Pope just provides cover for already-existing misogyny. That is to say, they hated women first and used faith to rationalize it second. You can tell this, because the Pope has lots of other opinions on stuff besides contraception, and Santorum ignores all of it. Juan Cole put together a list of ten Catholic teachings that Santorum rejects while pretending to be a hapless warrior for Catholic Jesus. Santorum has gone against the church on the issues of the Iraq War, universal health care, the death penalty, welfare, the minimum wage, union organizing, and immigration. Interestingly, not only does Santorum reject the church when it comes to these political matters, he also is a cafeteria Catholic on issues of religious questions. For instance, the Catholic Church accepts the theory of evolution and teaches that their god guided the process. Santorum rejects church teachings on this. In fact, not only does the Catholic Church accept evolution, but they are like most religions in this. Really, it's only evangelical Christians that hold that one must reject evolution as a part of their faith; Jews, mainline Protestants, Muslims, etc. by and large accept the theory as not in conflict with their religious beliefs.

The point isn't to say that Santorum is more or less Catholic than other Catholics who may agree with church teachings far more than he (while mostly rejecting the contraception nonsense as the medieval misogyny that it is). The point is that Catholics are a diverse group, politically speaking, and their faith has very little bearing on how they lean. Race, class, geography, personality, etc. all have more influence. In fact, as the example of Santorum shows, there's something of a cultural conflict between the markers of wingnuttery and Catholicism, and so Catholics who want to go full wingnut end up looking and sounding more like evangelicals. Which, in turn, means the notion that a Bible thumper like Santorum is going to make cultural appeals to Catholic voters sound even sillier, since he doesn't really come across as the average Catholic, insofar as there even is such a thing. I bet, if you surveyed people, a substantial number would think he's evangelical. Possibly even a majority.

By the way, that is one religious group that does have a predictable vote: evangelical Christians. While a minority are more liberal, by and large, most are fundamentalists. The whole point of being a fundamentalist is that it gives godly rationalizations to your conservative leanings, and so this isn't surprising. 

Conservatives are mad that Democrats picked a fight about contraception---apparently the rules they wrote said Democrats don't get to pick a fight---and now they're forced, forced I tell you, to go full wingnut and denounce all women having ready access to the contraception they need. Well, it's a real shame they're forced to come out so hard against contraception access, because you know, just giving up and letting women have this would at least get the comedians off your back.

Becoming the national laughingstock: Always known to be a winning strategy. Keep it up, Republicans! Eventually, every comedian and comic actor in the country will have a bit about your complete inability to understand that no, most of us don't actually think we're befouling ourselves with sexual intercourse.

If you're eager to say, "Nuh-uh, not every comedian! I bet Dennis Miller doesn't do a joke about this!", it might be time to consider how it is that conservative "comedy" is so easy to forget.

The Bible doesn't mention Rick Santorum's obsession, abortion (though not because ancient people didn't have it; the historical record suggests that as long as women have been getting pregnant, they've looked to abortion to control their fertility), but it does mention that it's really naughty to lie. In fact, lying about important issues,  i.e. bearing false witness, is so bad that it's one of the commandments. It's one that Santorum breaks on a daily basis, but it's particularly ironic that Rick Panty Sniffer would lie so flagrantly when it comes to one of his fellow Catholics on the subject of Catholicism.

Santorum's hostility to Kennedy's admirable enthusiasm for First Amendment protections that keep us from sliding into a fundamentalist theocracy have been covered to death, but I particularly like how he lied about what Kennedy clearly meant by "separation of church and state". This is what Santorum claims that separation of church and state means:

To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?

Yep! That's exactly what Catholic President JFK meant, that only atheists should have a role in government. Which is why he ran for President! Perhaps Santorum believes that Kennedy didn't have religion? I realize that Santorum has an allergy to Google, but seriously, it took roughly two seconds to fact check the "Kennedy was an atheist" insinuation.

This is the Republican strategy for imposing theocracy: confusing the issue. They're claiming that "religious liberty"  means giving fundamentalists the right to impose their religious views on everyone else, and now the claim is that unless we accede to theocracy, we're preventing religious people (I refuse to use that stupid term "people of faith") from participating in government. The only question now is how many people are stupid enough to buy this?

There's something intensely hilarious about Republicans acting like the election season was announced on them out of nowhere, giving them no time to prepare a suitable candidate. Steve Kornacki has an article about why the "white knight" fantasies Republicans are indulging, where some great candidate that can unify the nuts and the moderates will emerge and save them all from the black President, is just foolish. I recommend reading it; it has some good arguments with which to taunt your conservative friends indulging these fantasies. But really, the fantasy itself is fascinating enough:

This is why there’s suddenly loud talk about a new candidate jumping in the GOP race. If Romney melts down, Santorum looms as the next most likely victor — and his white hot culture war rhetoric these past few days is a perfect demonstration of why most November-minded Republicans believe his nomination would be a disaster. And after Santorum comes Newt Gingrich, whom those same Republicans tend to regard as poison, and then Ron Paul, who’s a nonstarter. As an unnamed Republican senator told ABC News late last week, “If Romney cannot win Michigan, we need a new candidate.”

Due to rioting in the streets and the eventual election of Richard Nixon, our country soured quickly on brokered conventions, but hey, Americans have short memories, so I can see the fantasy  has emerged. But it just makes Republicans look stupid. They kicked off the primary season like 8 months early! Now they're running around saying, "Oh shit, we forgot to develop an acceptable candidate." For the 2008 election, both Clinton and Obama had their campaigns up and running before 2007, and the Republicans are suggesting that it's just fine to grab someone off a shelf in August and toss them into the race. In other words, the very thing that got them into this mess---believing anyone would do and not really putting any effort forward to develop a good candidate---is what they foolishly think will save them. Why on earth do Republicans persist in this delusion?

Well, I think the answer lies in the Republican fondness for teleprompter jokes about Obama. No, hear me out. 

I'm sure it hasn't passed anyone here's attention that the now-mandatory jokes about Obama being unable to speak without a teleprompter* are racist dog whistles. These jokes substitute for swipes about "affirmative action" (not that conservatives don't make those as well, but those are more undeniably racist and so tend to exist more on the fringes), and "affirmative action", in turn, substitutes for more straightforward claims about race and merit, claims that have become socially toxic, unless you're Andrew Sullivan whining about the P.C. police shutting you down by making faces at you. But conservatives have a weird relationship with this spoken-in-code belief that the President is stupid and only has his position because the nation had a spasm of affirmative action impulse voting. On one hand, they do believe this. On the other, they only "believe" it, because they're not blind and can see just as well as the rest of us that he is a smart man. The result is that they initially believed any white dude in a suit could beat Obama, and that racism gave them an excellent tailwind in this race. And then, in a class too little too late fashion, they realized that they should have actually considered that Obama is a formidable candidate and beating him is going to be really hard to do. But, being conservatives, their solution appears to be, "Okay, get rid of all these other white dudes in suits, and grab someone else and throw him in! Surely he'll be better." It's weird. I've never seen anything quite like it. It's like someone who keeps buying the latest issue of US Weekly and then is surprised every time that it's not Harper's. I can't help but think if race wasn't such a distraction for conservatives, they could have put something better together. 

*Which is an inverse of reality. All politicians use one, because it looks better than the previous era, when all politicians---yes, Lincoln, yes, Roosevelt---read speeches off pieces of paper. (In fact, this practice saved Teddy Roosevelt's life; he had the manuscript of his speech in his pocket when a would-be assailant shot him, and the manuscript slowed the bullet down and kept it from killing him.) But off-teleprompter, Obama performs way better than average. In fact, his ability to give clear but eloquent answers off the cuff is one thing that separated him at a young age from other politicians.

Steve Kornacki has a good horse race summary taking the temperature of Mitt Romney's campaign. Diagnosis: not good. While Romney basically can't lose, barring some kind of weird delegate wrangling that I suppose is always possible but seems unlikely, the knocks he's taking are leaving him in poor fighting condition to take on the general election against Obama. A huge part of the problem is that Romney is just a shitty candidate, something that got forgotten when he was looking good next to the slate of cranks and kooks that challenged him in the primary. But I think a larger part of the problem is that hating Romney has become a stand-in for conservative self-loathing and the current right wing mania for purity. 

It's the same urge that is causing them to react to Obama accommodating their bullshit arguments about religious freedom by going on the full-blown warpath against contraception, functionally arguing that if you work for someone who is against contraception, you should be blocked from getting free contraception from a third party, even though it doesn't involve your employer at all. While the words "religious liberty" are being thrown around, that's just the usual right wing attempts to confuse the issue, much like when they deliberately conflate contraception, which prevents abortion, with abortion. In right wing land, preventing abortion is abortion, and allowing employees to have the religious liberty to obtain contraception is an attack on religious liberty. Also, up is down, black is white, cats are dogs, and pandas are ugly. Whatever blatant lie you need to believe to get you through the day. 

But I digress. The point is that they're attacking contraception in a big way, blanketing the right wing media with screeching attacks on women who use it,  impugning their moral character and conflating birth control pills with a party drug. Along with shitting all over Mitt Romney, who has moved to the right and accommodated them in every way, is just madness. But I was reading Corey Robin's book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin this weekend, and he had a lot of insight into this situation. Basically, he argues that when threatened with the reality that progress is going to happen and traditional power hierarchies are threatened, conservatives tend to turn on themselves, blaming themselves for letting this happen by not being tough enough. He describes those who denounce the French Revolution as blaming the toppled powers for their softness in letting this happen. 

I think we're seeing a similar mentality here. They see a black President, women gaining equality, gay couples getting married, people in the streets demanding economic justice. And their conclusion was, "We let this get out of hand." And they're not wrong, for instance, to grasp that the popularity of contraception helped create the cultural context where women start to think of themselves as full human beings with full human rights. As I wrote at RH Reality Check, telling women we're entitled to contraception is just going to usher that process along even further. Where I think they make a mistake is belieivng you can unring that bell. They think that adopting the absolutist stances they've previously let slide will cause their opponents to start re-believing we don't deserve nice things. But we've tasted freedom, and now that we know that it tastes good, it's going to be a lot harder to take it away.

Oh, lookee here, Grover Norquist is making impeachment threats against the President if he doesn't extend the Bush tax cuts:

Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach.

He spends a lot of time in this interview lying, claiming that things that the Republicans caused are Obama's fault (such as the "not working together" whine), but the boldness of this is breath-taking. But I'm glad he said it, because a lot of Beltway media is happy to convince themselves that the 1998 impeachment was an anomaly that was unique to the Clinton White House. Instead, I'd say that we're better off assuming that Republicans feel that it's always an option they're eager to take when an "illegitimate", i.e. Democratic, President is in the White House. That his race and family background causes conservatives to panic only makes the whole situation worse. 

Republicans simply believe the White House belongs to them, and one party should hold it in perpetuity. Unfortunately, this idea that a Democrat holding that office is somehow an interloper has subtly seeped into the unconscious of people who would probably even voted for Obama. I've noticed a maddening habit in the mainstream media of claiming that Republicans are seeking to "reclaim" the White House, as if it was theirs to begin with. I haven't heard that verb used with relation to Democrats, who tend to merely "win" that election. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but I do listen carefully for these things. Subtle things like that end up reinforcing conservatives' belief that they're the only "real" Americans, and that therefore the White House is their property.

What's funny, of course, is that they just get more shrill about how they're the only "real" Americans when the people who have the markers of the tribe---white, Christian suburbanites who adhere to more traditional gender roles---are dwindling in numbers compared to the rest of us. Unfortunately, we need to realize that their panic over this is only going to make them more determined to impeach Obama the first chance they get on the thinnest of made-up charges. It's not like Republicans in Congress have anything better to do with their time. All they ever do is try to get more tax cuts for the wealthy and push anti-choice legislation. That's not really a full time job, giving congressional Republicans lots of time to concoct ways to impeach the President.