Month: February 2012

Common Ground concern trolls and “religious liberty”

by digby

Lindsay Beyerstein speaks the sad truth:

Already Catholic special interests are objecting to funding contraception out of overall premiums because that means they’re funding contraception indirectly. This kind of intransigence illustrates how foolish it was to try to compromise with this constituency in the first place. They are professionally unreasonable.

Compromise is illusory because these guys are practicing spiritual accounting, not generally accepted accounting principles. They will make up the rules to get the result they want, namely, “We’re being oppressed by your birth control!”

The U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops hates the fact that any woman might get free birth control under health reform. No matter how this program is administered, the sophists at the USCCB will come up with a sob story about how they are being oppressed by our contraception cooties. We live in a highly interdependent society with complex organizations and multiple streams of money. If you’re creative enough, you can always figure out why a dollar somebody else spends on birth control is tainting you.

Listening to leading Catholic concern troll Melinda Hennenberger is instructive. She admits that the Bishops, the Republicans and scads of catholic conservatives won’t be satisfied with this. But she says the important thing is that the Catholic allies of the president “feel listened to” and that he has acknowledged that “Religious Liberty” is extremely important aqnd has been attended to.

Good old Religion Industrial Complex useful idiot Hennenberger — with friends like her, women do not need enemies.

As Sarah Posner documented,and I referenced below, “Religious Liberty” is the new front in the culture wars.

The Manhattan Declaration is billed as “A Call of Christian Conscience,” drafted and signed by Catholics, evangelicals, and Orthodox Christians, an “ecumenism” celebrated by its promoters as evidence of its far-reaching appeal. The document targets reproductive freedom (enemy of the “sanctity of life”) and LGBTQ equality (enemy of the “dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife”) as foes of Christians’ religious freedom. It’s a new document but an old canard. And it’s proof that the culture wars are not only not over; there hasn’t even been a truce…

The Manhattan Declaration assumes that in a country with constitutionally protected religious liberty, any law intended to protect the citizenry’s other freedoms should be subject to the veto threat of the signers of the Manhattan Declaration itself. This is not a new strategy for the religious right. Since the 1970s the Hyde Amendment has “protected” the “conscience” of people who find abortion morally objectionable and don’t want tax dollars paying for someone else’s (although many of those people of “conscience” also oppose war but have barely lifted a finger to stop us from paying for the killing of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan). Religious right legal groups have used the courts to try to dismantle the separation of church and state on similar grounds, claiming that everything from LGBTQ equality to prohibitions on the public display of the Ten Commandments infringes on their religious liberty as Christians.

You really should read the “Manhattan Declaration” in full to get a good idea of how this is going to play out (with the help of “allies” like Melinda Hennenberger.)

And, by the way, it would be really helpful if the President didn’t use the term himself in this context. The only time he should ever use the term “Religious Liberty” is when it will make the other side mad. That’s how you appropriate their rhetoric rather than play into it.

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CPAC repulsion

Ann Coulter is provocative and offensive and wonderful at self-promotion. And if it weren’t for all those attributes, she could very well claim a fourth: an effective surrogate for Mitt Romney.

The conservative best-selling author gave her usual speech at CPAC on Friday. Instead of calling John Edwards a “faggot” (like she did years ago), she declared that Bill Clinton saved the Constitution by repeatedly ejaculating on White House interns. It was a stupid laugh line really not worth repeating, save to point out how likely it is to overshadow the impassioned plea she made earlier in the speech to get the crowd to drop its revulsion of Romney.

Heheheheh. She said “ejaculate on the Constitution.”)She’s such a lovely gal.
But IMO, if Ann Coulter is making a plea for people to drop their revulsion for her candidate, you’ve got a bigger problem than you think you do.

Meanwhile, Governor Repulsive said at the same conference that he’ll make sure the the federal government defunds Planned Parenthood (among other states’ rights positions.) At this point I’m waiting for the first Republican to commit to breaking up the Union entirely and just mustering state militias to defend the border(s) and hiring private troops to police the world under multi-national corporation flags. (Hey, if corporations are people, they can form their own “nation”, right?) Ron Paul comes close to this already with his “letters of marque and reprisal” substituting for military intervention overseas and devolution of virtually everything else to the states.

Why are they pussyfooting around? Clearly, they do not believe in the “United States” of America anymore. And yet they are the loudest, jingoistic nationalists on the planet when it suits them. It must be chaos inside these people’s heads.

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Cooperating with evil

by digby

That’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? I guess evil is in the eye of the cooperator.

The big news this morning is that the White House has “reached accommodation” on the birth control issue. (No word on whether the Bishops have been accommodated.)At first glance, it seems to me that it’s actually a retreat on the politics but an accommodation on the policy itself that isn’t too bad.(It’s possibly better for Catholic workers, who may not have to share their evil birth control habits with the Church bureaucrats.)

One source familiar with the decision described the accommodation as “Hawaii-plus,” insisting that it’s better than the Hawaii plan — for both sides.
In Hawaii the employer is responsible for referring employees to places where they can obtain the contraception; Catholic leaders call that material cooperation with evil. But what the White House will likely announce later today is that the relationship between the religious employer and the insurance company will not need to have any component involving contraception. The insurance company will reach out on its own to the women employees.

How changing the paperwork trail isn’t “cooperating with evil” and will salve the institution’s “conscience” is anyone’s guess. Apparently, God is mostly concerned about keeping up appearances. Who knew?

Whether or not the Bishops accept this accommodation, I do think this has put birth control permanently on the sex police menu and it’s not going to go away. From this point on, contraception will be “controversial” in health care politics. How can it not? It’s “evil.” So, in that sense they win regardless. It’s moved the ball a little bit, drawn attention to the issue and reinforced the Bishops’ authority. And that’s why they did it.

By framing efforts to prevent government establishment or privileging of particular religions as infringements on religious freedom, the Bishops’ religious liberty campaign is the latest evidence of the strengthening of the alliance between the Catholic Church and the evangelical right, whose precepts were laid out in the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, which stated:

[W]e are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.

These “fashionable ideologies” and “instruments of coercion” are later in the document less euphemistically alluded to as “despotism” and “tyranny.” In the parlance of the Manhattan Declaration, “such persons claiming these ‘rights’ are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.”

While evangelicals do not generally share the Catholic Church’s prohibition on contraceptives, sixty conservative religious leaders have nonetheless sent a letter to President Obama and Health and Human Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, arguing that objections to the mandate are not limited to Catholics. The signers, including representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals, Focus on the Family, the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, and Orthodox Jewish groups, wrote “to stress that religious organizations and leaders of other faiths are also deeply troubled by and opposed to the mandate and the narrow exemption.”
[…]
In short, don’t be surprised if the “religious freedom” argument finds its way into conservative arguments about “big government” in 2012. It’s not just for the religious right anymore.

I’m guessing the Tea Party congress is going to have fits of “conscience” every time they want to hold up a bill. Should be fun.

Update: And if this is supposed to end the culture war for this campaign, the Democrats had better hope that Nate Silver’sscary post this morning is quickly proven wrong:

Mr. Santorum closed strongly and outperformed his polls in several states so far, including Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri and South Carolina (where he was projected to place fourth by the polls but finished in third). That could indicate that voters like Mr. Santorum the more they get to know him — indeed, his favorability ratings are strong among Republican voters — or that his supporters are more enthusiastic. Either quality would be an asset going forward, allowing him to win his share of close calls against Mr. Romney.

Thus, it seems at least possible that Mr. Santorum’s momentum will be more sustainable. To have a chance at winning in the delegate count, he will need to supplant Mr. Gingrich as Mr. Romney’s major rival in the South. The results in Missouri, a borderline Southern state where Mr. Santorum beat Mr. Romney by 30 points without Mr. Gingrich on the ballot, suggest that he could run strongly if Mr. Gingrich were to bow out.

It is certainly not a straightforward path, but nor is Mr. Romney’s at this point. And so far in this Republican race, betting on the underdog has yielded dividends.

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Who will fact-check the fact checkers?

by David Atkins

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a lecture at UCSB by guest lecturer Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of Communication and founder of FactCheck.org. The key thrust of her talk was that the prevelance of pseudo-objective “he said/she said” journalism, the trend toward increased spending in elections, and micro-targeted messaging meant that providing accountability for falsehoods in political advertising would become more and more difficult with each passing year. In that vein, she mentioned her involvement in the new Annenberg project FlackCheck, whose purpose is to ferret out misstatements and exaggerations in political advertising.

Of course, the challenge for any organization with this sort of stated purpose is to create accountability in a timely fashion so that campaigns and advertisers feel the brunt of public scrutiny. Leveraging the organization’s fact-checking capability to shame local advertising affiliates into taking off the air third-party ads filled with distortions and untruths was part of the goal, though Dr. Jamieson admitted that timeliness was a concern.

I applaud Dr. Jamieson and Annenberg for the effort, and for taking the fight to (to paraphrase the speaker) two generations of deconstructionists in academia who claim that there is no verifiable truth to be found in anything, only socially and liguistically constructed opinions. Certainly, demolishing that conceit is a fight worth pursuing in itself.

But as I pointed out in the Q&A session, there are two problems with the supposedly independent, objective factcheck model.

1) Quis custodet ipsos custodes? Who will watch the watchers? Readers will certainly recall the Politifact lie of the year fiasco in which they claimed that Democrats and left-affiliated groups were lying in saying the the Ryan budget plan constituted an end to Medicare. According to Politifact, turning Medicare into a voucher system and vastly underfunding it doesn’t actually constitute “ending” Medicare–a bizarre opinion which has made Politifact lose much if not all of its credibility with thinking people. Putting too much power into the hands of supposedly objective groups doesn’t do much good when the organizations themselves either lack true objectivity, or lack the intelligence and common sense to use it.

2) Partisan traditional and new media groups are already doing most of the fact-checking, anyway. When I want to see what latest lies are coming out of the conservative media establishment, I don’t go to CNN’s “Keeping Them Honest” segment, or to anything or anyone affiliated with a non-partisan non-profit like Annenberg. I go to progressive blogs and to MSNBC. When I want to see what latest conservative attacks are coming down the pike, I likewise don’t rush to non-partisan media sources, but rather to conservative blogs and to Fox News. Both sides of the partisan divide and the campaigns themselves do a far better, faster and more accessible job fact-checking one another than do actual purported fact-checking organizations, if for no other reason than that they have the motivation and legions of willing crowdsourced volunteers to do so.

That’s not to say that independent media organizations should not exist to adjudicate competing claims. They should. But the principal accountability mechanism comes not from independent top-down organizations, but from bottom-up organic ones. In many ways, this is similar to the model of a modern courtroom: the judge exists not to judge the veracity or fairness of the claims made by the attorneys, but to ensure that the process functions smoothly and according to the law. It’s up to each attorney to put their best foot forward, and leave it to the judge/jury to decide the case. It’s fair to point out, though, that this model only works if each attorney has an equal chance to present their case. In modern politics, one side of the argument is usually vastly outspent, which makes independent organizations more necessary–but it’s still primarily the job of the opposition to cry foul when false claims are made.

That ground-up model also solves the micro-targeting problem. Even if campaigns target their false messages to narrowly circumscribed audiences, the chances that some denizen of the partisan blogosphere will notice it and propel it into the national consciousness is actually fairly high at this point. Heck, it’s hard to do an opposition research poll with a few hundred people these days without someone with an ax to grind taking notice and leaking its contents.

So kudos to Dr. Jamieson and the Annenberg Foundation for fighting the good fight. But I fear that the new media world is already rendering passe their model of accountability in advertising.

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Santorum drivel

by digby

Compromising situation:

“Look, I want to create every opportunity for women to be able to serve this country, and they do so in an amazing and wonderful way. They’re a great addition to the – and have been for a long time – to the armed services of our country,” Santorum said. “But I do have concerns about women in frontline combat.”

He added, “I think that can be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interests of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved. And I think that’s probably – you know, it already happens, of course, with the camaraderie of men in combat. But I think it would be even more unique if women were in combat. I think that’s probably not in the best interests of men, women or the mission.”

I’m not sure what he meant by that but it sounds as though he thinks the soldiers will all be involved with each other and they will get “emotional” when their turtledove is in danger. Or maybe he just thinks the men will be all chivalrous and manly and won’t let the little ladies do the fighting and everything will get all messed up.

Plus, nobody will be allowed to use birth control so they’ll be procreating for Jesus all over the front lines. It’s obviously a recipe for disaster.

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What could go wrong?

by digby

Here’s a trainwreck in the making:

“‘I was thinking about how sexy it would be to kiss you,’” world renowned pickup artist Wayne Elise told a group of young Rick Santorum fans. “You can say that [to a girl], it’s a cool.”

Elise, better known by his handle “Juggler” from Neil Strauss’ notorious pickup memoir The Game, was offering advice to attendees at conservative mega-conference CPAC on how to improve their dating game. Remember that old VH1 reality show The Pickup Artist with that lanky host with a Slash hat and goggles teaching people how to insult girls then hit on them when their self esteem is shattered? This is one of his top rivals, charging upwards of $5,000 for a one-day private session.

But on Thursday, young socially conservative activists got it for free. One tip, he noted, was to introduce sensuality into early conversations with girls — like the above quote — to keep from falling into the platonic zone with your target.

Uhm, fellas? Santorum believes that sex is supposed to be “procreative” only, you know that don’t you? Birth control is a no no? Just saying ..

You have to hand it to CPAC — they put the Party in the Tea Party. (I can’t wait to hear who Ann Coulter is going to call gay this year.)

Update: the article makes an important observation about this particular confab:

Unlike most conservative gatherings, which often resemble Bingo night at the retirement home, the annual conference is usually dominated by college Republicans who bus in en masse. That means the dating scene is sizzling.

It’s important to keep in mind that there are plenty of young conservative assholes too.

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Constitutional Catholics

by digby

Here’s a nice Lawrence O’Donnell segment on the constitutional implications of the the “conscience” exemption concept, featuring David Boies:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here’s a piece by Linda Greenhouse discussing the constitutional issues as well. Her last sentence spells out the absurdity of this argument:

The question would be whether a church that has failed to persuade its own flock of the rightness of its position could persuade at least five justices.

Sadly, I’m afraid that such an obvious flaw in the logic will not have any sway on this court.

Meanwhile, the great GOP Hispanic hope takes on the issue:

Legislation introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to reverse the Obama administration’s birth control rule would effectively permit any employer to deny contraception coverage in their employee health plans, critics note.

The Rubio bill, The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, comes in response to a Catholic firestorm that the administration’s exemption on its birth control rule does not include religious hospitals and universities along with churches. But this bill appears to go far beyond that, permitting any employer to claim the religious exemption without a criteria.

Gosh, I wonder if they’re going to find a “compromise” between this and the President’s order? Like, perhaps, just letting the Catholic institutions opt out? You know, what the Catholic Bishops have been insisting on from the beginning?

Update: Another tick-tock from inside the administration thatchallenges the fatuous notion that the administration was playing 11 dimensional chess with this decision:

The Vice President and others argued that this wouldn’t be seen as an issue of contraception – it would be seen as an issue of religious liberty. They questioned the polling of the rule advocates, arguing that it didn’t explain the issue in full, it ignored the question of what religious groups should have to pay for. And they argued that women voters for whom this was an important issue weren’t likely to vote for Mitt Romney, who has drawn a strong anti-abortion line as a presidential candidate, saying he would end federal funding to Planned Parenthood and supporting a “personhood” amendment that defines life as beginning at the moment of fertilization.

Political hands disagreed with that interpretation. Cultural issues will play a bigger issue in the 2012 election than they did during the economic crisis of 2008, they said. Some of the suburban women up for grabs in this election, ones who are starting to feel more confident about the economy, can be firmly won over if they learned about this rule – if they also were told that President Obama supported an exemption for houses of worship while Romney opposes not only abortion but federal funding for contraception.

If anyone doubted that opposition to this inside the administration was about dealing away women’s rights to appeal to conservatives, that should clear it up.

(And Leon Panetta, who is featured heavily in this story, should probably concentrate on which citizens they’re going to target for assassination next and leave the morality of birth control pills to others. He has his hands full.)

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Attacking Schneiderman and Harris is a Mistake

by David Atkins

I don’t have too much to say about the big foreclosure settlement that Dave Dayen hasn’t already covered far better than I could. It’s a complicated mess, but suffice it to say that while the deal does provide some relief to struggling and victimized homeowners, and does allow for the possibility of future investigations, it’s largely a slap-on-the-wrist measure that puts no one in jail and lets the banks off the hook for a tiny fraction of what they ought to be paying out for their crimes.

There are many people and factors to blame for what happened here, among them:

1) the banks, obviously, which were engaged in such a frantic rush to build their mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligation castles in the air that they stopped caring if the titles to homes were legitimate, and conveniently entrusted essentially their entire title verification process to the shady MERS system;

2) the financial sector executive compensation system, which ensures that everyone involved in this crime-of-the-century is actually rewarded for their part in it, no matter what settlements might be made;

3) the legal system, which makes prosecuting these sorts of crimes even at an institutional level, to say nothing of an individual level, extremely difficult;

4) the government in general, which failed for years to regulate a patently broken title system and couldn’t exactly afford for too many questions to be asked about why the banks were using this patchwork system in the first place;

5) the entire asset-based economic system built by conservatives and neoliberals alike, which has put the entire economy at the mercy of the health of financial institutions and asset-based markets like stocks and housing;

6) the Obama Administration, which has bought into the neoliberal asset-based model lock, stock and barrel, and has wanted nothing more than for this ugly situation to be swept under a rug so that the financial institutions could have “regulatory certainty” and “confidence” again.

But the people who should not be getting the blame are brave folks like Schneiderman and Harris. Schneiderman and Harris stood up to immense amounts of Administration pressure for months in an attempt to secure as much accountability as they could for the recklessly criminal financial sector cartels. A settlement on this issue was always going to happen for the reasons I stated above: the entire weight of the system basically demanded it. As long as banks are allowed to run our economic lives, nothing serious is going to be done to put financial institutions already on precarious footing into even more danger. Nothing is going to be done to throw their major executives in jail as long as people and government are seen as subservient to the Great Free Market, rather than the other way around.

Harris and Schneiderman fought as long and as hard as they could against this tide, and their efforts without question led to a better settlement than would have been achieved without them. I know there’s a temptation to rail against them and declare them traitors, and that’s understandable.

But I would advise that progressive wrath be focused where it belongs: on Holder, on the President, on the financial institutions and their executives (of course), and on the entire neoliberal ideology that enabled this situation to occur in the first place.

Not, however, on Schneiderman and Harris, without whom this settlement would have been worse, and without whom this issue would have been quickly and quietly swept under the rug without significant national attention. If we, hating the end result, are quick to turn on our best friends and strongest champions no matter whether they fight for us or not, no one will stand up for us in the future.

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How dare these illegals claim our waters?

by digby

Finally, a rightwinger with some sense:

A lawmaker in Mississippi is pushing to change the name of “the body of water located directly south” of the state, the Gulf of Mexico, to the “Gulf of America.”

State Rep. Steve Holland (D) has introduced HB 150, which says that “for all official purposes within the state of Mississippi, the body of water located directly south of Hancock, Harrison and Jackson counties shall be known as the ‘Gulf Of America’; and for related purposes.”

It’s an insult that all these illegal alien names exist in our country. I think we should change them all starting with New Mexico. We’ll call it New America! (I’ll have to think about what to do about California and Texas.) And then we’ll start on the food. First, we could insist that they change Taco Bell to Liberty Bell — and they could serve “all American corn wraps” instead of tacos and USA bean packets instead of burritos. I don’t even want to think about how to deal with almost every town, school and highway in the Southwest but I’m sure we can get it done if we put our minds to it. It’s that important.

*click the link to see the real punchline.

Robot glitch

by digby

Everyone’s citing Romney’s Massachusetts requirement for emergency contraception as evidence of incoherence in now condemning the birth control decision, but what about this?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?

ROMNEY: George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising. States have a right to ban contraception? I can’t imagine a state banning contraception. I can’t imagine the circumstances where a state would want to do so, and if I were a governor of a state or…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, the Supreme Court has ruled —

(CROSSTALK)

ROMNEY: … or a — or a legislature of a state — I would totally and completely oppose any effort to ban contraception. So you’re asking — given the fact that there’s no state that wants to do so, and I don’t know of any candidate that wants to do so, you’re asking could it constitutionally be done? We can ask our constitutionalist here.

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m sure Congressman Paul…

(CROSSTALK)

ROMNEY: OK, come on — come on back…

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: … asking you, do you believe that states have that right or not?

ROMNEY: George, I — I don’t know whether a state has a right to ban contraception. No state wants to. I mean, the idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do that no — no state wants to do and asking me whether they could do it or not is kind of a silly thing, I think.

(APPLAUSE)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hold on a second. Governor, you went to Harvard Law School. You know very well this is based on…

ROMNEY: Has the Supreme Court — has the Supreme Court decided that states do not have the right to provide contraception? I…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes, they have. In 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut.

ROMNEY: The — I believe in the — that the law of the land is as spoken by the Supreme Court, and that if we disagree with the Supreme Court — and occasionally I do — then we have a process under the Constitution to change that decision. And it’s — it’s known as the amendment process.

And — and where we have — for instance, right now we’re having issues that relate to same-sex marriage. My view is, we should have a federal amendment of the Constitution defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. But I know of — of no reason to talk about contraception in this regard.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you’ve got the Supreme Court decision finding a right to privacy in the Constitution.

ROMNEY: I don’t believe they decided that correctly. In my view, Roe v. Wade was improperly decided. It was based upon that same principle. And in my view, if we had justices like Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia, and more justices like that, they might well decide to return this issue to states as opposed to saying it’s in the federal Constitution.

And by the way, if the people say it should be in the federal Constitution, then instead of having unelected judges stuff it in there when it’s not there, we should allow the people to express their own views through amendment and add it to the Constitution. But this idea that justice…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But should that be done in this case?

ROMNEY: Pardon?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Should that be done in this case?

ROMNEY: Should this be done in the case — this case to allow states to ban contraception? No. States don’t want to ban contraception. So why would we try and put it in the Constitution?

With regards to gay marriage, I’ve told you, that’s when I would amend the Constitution. Contraception, it’s working just fine, just leave it alone.

He got laughs at that last line, but his whole demeanor was one of someone who thought it was cracked to even bring up the subject. “Why are we talking about birth control?”
I wrote this the morning after the debate:

[Romney] really proved last night that he isn’t in touch with the religious right base with his answer on birth control. He acted like it was insane to assume that anyone anywhere would like to ban it and didn’t seem to understand the connection between Griswold and Roe. And that’s just wrong. There’s a whole bunch of social conservatives for whom this is a priority of the first order and his dismissive attitude has to grate. Many of them believe that the pill is an “abortifacient” and believe it should be banned. Still other believe, as Rick Santorum does, that sex must always be procreative and not just “for pleasure.”

Now, it’s true that the vast majority of Americans don’t agree with this and use birth control without any thoughts to these issues, but Mitt’s still trying to get the votes of the GOP base and I would think that was seen as a slap in the face — a disregard of their very serious beliefs on this issue.

Maybe it won’t matter, but church goers are the foot soldiers in any Republican election. He may have to distance himself from them to appeal to the middle, but it’s odd for him to blatantly insult them in a GOP primary debate. Frankly, from what I saw, it was a genuine lack of understanding about this, not a political calculation. He’s just not tuned into his base. Which explains why they can’t stand him.

Granted, Romney was in New Hampshire, where the GOP base may be less socially conservative, but he behaved as if this question came completely out of left field. Maybe he’s a better actor than I thought, but he seemed genuinely confused as to why it was even being discussed.

I guess it doesn’t really matter. Romney’s fully on the bandwagon now. But I still think it’s yet another insight into the void where his soul should be.

Update: Adele Stan has written a terrific article on this, giving the whole history and highlighting the interesting, but little known, fact that it was the thrice married Gingrich who really ramped this up in the Florida campaign.

*That would be the newly minted Catholic, Newt Gingrich:

One of those women, Anne Manning, became romantically involved with Gingrich during his ’76 campaign. The curly-haired young Englishwoman, then married to another professor at West Georgia, Tim Chowns, was an avid volunteer in Newt’s Carrollton office. “I did have a relationship with him,” she discloses for the first time, “but when it suited him, he would totally blow you off.”

In the spring of 1977, she was in Washington to attend a census-bureaus workshop when Gingrich took her to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. He met her back at her modest hotel room. “We had oral sex,” she says. “He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, “I never slept with her.” Indeed, before Gingrich left that evening, she says, he threatened her: “If you ever tell anybody about this, I’ll say you’re lying.”

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