Month: October 2012

The president says the Grand Bargain negotiations “won’t be pleasant”

by digby

So, the president gave an off the record interview to the Des Moines Register in which he discussed the Grand Bargain. (The paper apparently pitched a fit after the fact and the campaign agreed to allow it to be published.)

Q: Mr. President, we know that John Boehner and the House Republicans have not been easy to work with, and certainly you’ve had some obstacles in the Senate, even though it’s been controlled by the Democrats. At the time, whenever — we talked a lot about, in 2008, hope and change. I’m curious about what you see your role is in terms of changing the tone and the perception that Washington is broken. But particularly, sir, if you were granted a second term, how do you implode this partisan gridlock that has gripped Washington and Congress and basically our entire political structure right now?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, Rick, let me answer you short term and long term. In the short term, the good news is that there’s going to be a forcing mechanism to deal with what is the central ideological argument in Washington right now, and that is: How much government do we have and how do we pay for it?

So when you combine the Bush tax cuts expiring, the sequester in place, the commitment of both myself and my opponent — at least Governor Romney claims that he wants to reduce the deficit — but we’re going to be in a position where I believe in the first six months we are going to solve that big piece of business.

It will probably be messy. It won’t be pleasant. But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I’ve been offering to the Republicans for a very long time, which is $2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in spending, and work to reduce the costs of our health care programs.

And we can easily meet — “easily” is the wrong word — we can credibly meet the target that the Bowles-Simpson Commission established of $4 trillion in deficit reduction, and even more in the out-years, and we can stabilize our deficit-to-GDP ratio in a way that is really going to be a good foundation for long-term growth. Now, once we get that done, that takes a huge piece of business off the table.

He then says that once he gets that done along with immigration reform, they can tackle the “non-ideological” agenda:

Now we’re in a position where we can start on some things that really historically have not been ideological. We can start looking at a serious corporate tax reform agenda that’s revenue-neutral but lowers rates and broadens the base — something that both Republicans and Democrats have expressed an interest in.

I wrote yesterday about Shumer’s recent speech in which he said that we shouldn’t lower tax rates to lower to the deficit. And I mused that he might be doing it in order to decouple the issue from the Grand Bargain and do it separately down the road. The president’s interview says to me as if that’s exactly what’s happening. You see, the president sees this “tax reform” as “non-ideological.” If they can tackle the deficit first with “$2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in spending, and work to reduce the costs of our health care programs” they can feel free to come back and lower the rates after the fact.

The question, of course, is still what Obama’s Grand Bargain of “$2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in spending, and work to reduce the costs of our health care programs” looks like in detail if you leave “tax reform” out of it.

Here’s the Grand Bargain Obama offered in the debt ceiling negotiations, which had the same four trillion dollar target:

[T]he major elements of a bargain seemed to be falling into place: $1.2 trillion in agency cuts, smaller cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients, nearly $250 billion in Medicare savings achieved in part by raising the eligibility age. And $800 billion in new taxes.

Now the Republicans were worried about that 800 billion and they counter-offered:

In Boehner’s offer Friday night, the taxes came with strings attached. The Republicans wanted Obama to give up plans to raise the tax rate paid by the wealthiest Americans, now set at 35 percent. Instead, they wanted that rate to go down. They also wanted to preserve low rates for investment income — one of the biggest perks for the wealthy in the tax code — and establish a blanket exemption from U.S. taxes for corporate profits earned overseas.

Another key caveat: Much of the $800 billion would have to come from overhauling the tax code — not from higher tax rates. The Republicans believed lower rates and a simpler code would generate new revenue by discouraging cheating and spurring economic growth. If the White House would agree to count that money, the Republican leaders said, then they might have a deal…

So there were issues to work out that Sunday but also reason for optimism. In its counterproposal, the White House appeared to accept the $800 billion tax offer and a lower top rate. The administration rejected the exemption for overseas profits, but Geithner told the Republicans, they said, that he could get most of the way there.

And when Boehner brought up economic growth, arguing that his caucus would not accept tax increases under any other terms, the Republicans saw Geithner as receptive, Jackson said. “It was literally one of the last things discussed when they came in on that Sunday. And Geithner said, ‘Yes, we accept that,’ ” Jackson recalled. “We viewed it as a breakthrough.”

The story is that the deal fell through when Obama came back and asked for another 400 billion in tax hikes and the tea party shut down the whole thing because they didn’t want any tax hikes in the first place.

But let’s assume that Shumer gets tax reform off the table as part of the Grand Bargain which we now know the president says he wants as well. Can the president make his deal without it? I don’t know. But he offered a deal without it during the last Grand Bargain negotiations. And he now says he’s confident that he has the leverage to get them to accept that deal.

And that deal is this:

1.2 trillion in agency cuts, smaller cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients, nearly $250 billion in Medicare savings achieved in part by raising the eligibility age. And $800 billion in new taxes.

I agree that that “won’t be pleasant.”

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Stewart on the debates

by digby

ICYMI: Romney endorses Obama’s foreign policy.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

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Rape and God’s Will

by David Atkins

By now you’ve probably read about this:

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Tuesday when a woman is impregnated during a rape, “it’s something God intended.”

Mourdock, who’s been locked in a tight race with Democratic challenger Rep. Joe Donnelly, was asked during the final minutes of a debate whether abortion should be allowed in cases of rape or incest.

“I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happened,” Mourdock said.

Forget the repulsive misogyny for a moment, and consider the theological implications.

By far the biggest challenge to the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) is the theodicy, also known as the problem of evil. The God of Abraham is supposed to be omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and most importantly omnibenevolent (all-good.) Yet evil exists. How? Most other religions don’t have this problem, as they believe in fallible deities. But an infallible deity shouldn’t allow evil or suffering. Or at the very least, the suffering needn’t be as harsh as it is.

There are two main kinds of evil that create a challenge to the Abrahamic God. The first are acts of evil beyond human control: tsunamis, pandemics, earthquakes, childhood leukemia, etc. These are actually more problematic because the answers (greater goods, necessary punishments, “tests”, etc.) are so inadequate.

But evil perpetrated by human beings is different. Most theologians resolve it by the simple hand-wave of “free will.” God, we are told, gave humans free will as the greatest good of all, and we can use that free will to do good or evil. That does create a challenge for His omniscience: does God know what we’re going to use our free will for before we do it? If so, is it our will? If not, given the complexities of interactions, how can He know what will happen five minutes from now, let alone the end of time?

But absent the omniscience challenge to free will, it’s a fairly comprehensive answer. The poorest free person is supposed to be better off than the most comfortable slave, so permitting people to perpetrate evil acts is supposed to be better than denying them the freedom to do so (which is also why we allow children to play with grenades!) But what is unthinkable is that a loving God would actually create a world in which Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy and Adolf Hitler were not only free to perpetrate their evil, but were encouraged or compelled to by a God who actually planned for that evil to happen and felt that the world would be a better place for letting it happen than for stopping it.

Which brings us to rapists. If God is powerful enough to stop rape from happening, knows rape is going to happen, and doesn’t want people to rape one another, then how could He allow rape? It has to be free will, right? Because giving people the freedom to rape one another is a greater good than preventing rape? Otherwise, God isn’t a particularly likeable fellow.

So what do we make of this?

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Tuesday when a woman is impregnated during a rape, “it’s something God intended.”

It can’t be a loving God. Unless, of course, Richard Mourdock doesn’t see rape as particularly evil.

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Reality TV Politics

by digby

Americans are really interested in this contest:

59.2 million people watched the final presidential debate, the lowest turnout for a presidential debate this cycle, according to Nielsen.

Last night’s foreign policy debate in Boca Raton, Fla., was carried across 11 networks, as Fox News instead ran Game 7 of the MLB NLCS playoffs, which drew 8.1 million viewers. Monday Night Football also drew 10.7 million viewers to ESPN.

The 59.2 million reflects total audiences for ABC, CBS, NBC, Univision, PBS, CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, CurrentTV and CNBC between 9 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. ET, and for Telemundo, which aired the debate on tape delay.

12.391 million viewers watched the debate on NBC, accoring to that network’s statistics, making it the most-watched channel. 11.47 million watched on Fox News, breaking an all-time record for the cable network. 11.730 million watched on ABC and 8.437 million watched on CBS, according to NBC. 5.808 watched on CNN and 4.064 watched on MSNBC, according to CNN.

Per Nielsen, 67.2 million people watched the first presidential debate in Denver, Colo., on Oct. 3. 65.6 million people watched the second town-hall debate on Oct. 16 in Hempstead, N.Y. Only 51.4 million people watched the vice presidential debate on Oct. 11 in Danville, Ky.

Fox set a record. I wonder how many of them had to jump start their pace makers every time ole Mitt started droning on about “peace” and “helping the good people of the Middle East.” That had to hurt a little.

Here’s a rundown on the instant polls. Obama won number three handily.

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Credibility wetdreams

by digby

You have to love this from Joe Nocera in the New York Times:

Judging by the first two presidential debates — I’m writing this on the eve of the third — there is one area where Mitt Romney and President Obama are in at least quasi agreement: the need for serious tax reform.

“I want to bring the rates down; I want to simplify the tax code; and I want to get middle-income taxpayers to have lower taxes,” said the Republican challenger during the second debate. He added that he would limit “deductions and exemptions and credits, particularly for people at the high end” — while getting us “on track for a balanced budget.”

In response, President Obama said that he, too, wanted to bring rates down for the middle class. But, he said, “in addition to some tough spending cuts, we’ve also got to make sure that the wealthy do a little bit more.”
[…]
[T]he need for tax reform is probably more urgent now than it was in the 1980s. Then, the deficit wasn’t nearly the problem that it is today. Now, tax reform is just about the only politically palatable way for Congress to begin the process of lowering the deficit.

Assuming that the deficit is the primary problem here, does it really make sense to “bring rates down” and lower corporate taxes? Sure, closing loopholes makes sense and “asking the wealthy to pay a little bit more” is a good idea, but really, if the deficit is so goddamned important, why do they insist that we must lower rates at the same time? It makes no sense.

Well, guess what? There is a reason and it’s as stupid as the myth of the confidence fairy and the bond vigilantes. We’ll call it the credibility wet dream:

Lowering tax rates will give Congress and the president — whomever he turns out to be — cover for broadening the tax base, reforming entitlement spending and raising additional revenue.

In order to close the deficit they must cut be allowed to cut taxes so that they will have the credibility to raise taxes. That is what they are saying.

Now Chuck Shumer has thrown an interesting monkey wrench into this debate by saying that we shouldn’t lower the tax rates. But I trust Chuck “Wall Street” Shumer as much as I trust the confidence fairy on this stuff. Ezra Klein interviewed him a few weeks ago and he said all the right things on the tax rates. But he also said this:

EK: I want to go back to something you said a moment ago: that our two biggest problems are median wages and deficits. I know a lot of folks who would say our two biggest problems are jobs and jobs. And as for deficits, real interest rates are negative. The market is begging us to take their money. This focus on deficits, these folks argue, is hugely damaging. We need to be spending our time and political will on jobs.

CS: Here’s what I tell my more liberal colleagues: We’re like a blindfolded man walking towards a cliff. If we keep walking in that direction, we’ll fall off, like other countries have fallen off. You can argue whether we’re 500 yards or 5,000 yards from the cliff, but it’s unsustainable. And it also gets away from helping the middle class, as the deficits mean we don’t have the money to pay for some of the things like education and scientific research that expand middle-class incomes.

So I don’t agree. I don’t think the deficit is our only problem. But it’s number two, and it’s real.

I’m hoping that he is trying to decouple “tax reform” from the fiscal cliff negotiations. And certainly, if he manages to convince even one Villager that “tax reform” doesn’t mean lowering rates so we can raise rates, he will have done us all a solid. But in the end, I have a feeling that this notion of lowering rates in order to buy the goodwill they need to raise rates is not going to be so easily dismissed.

And recall that in the summer of 2011 when Boehner were within an inch of a Grand Bargain that cut all the social programs, tax reform wasn’t in the mix. They don’t need it to do a very bad deal.

Here’s what Chuck has in mind in the short term:

EK: But more specifically on process. You guys won’t be able to get everything done in the lame-duck. So how do you build the tax reform process, however it ends up working, in such a way that you can trust it?

CS: The more detail the better. You can’t just say we’ll raise this amount of revenues and keep distribution the same. You need some real detail here. You need to lock in what the rates will be. If you need $1.5 to $1.8 trillion in revenues, you can gain about a trillion dollars from raising the top rate and having the estate tax go up, and you’ll be able to find another $500 billion on the expenditure side That you could get from high-income people. So we need that level of detail. You can’t fudge it.

Just a reminder: this is a negotiation. And that means Shumer is making his demands, very likely with the knowledge that he won’t get what he wants. So the question isn’t whether this is a reasonable ask, but what it is he’s really after. I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that the target they’ve all arbitrarily agreed upon initially is 4 trillion.

Nocera outlines all the reasons why nothing has really changed and the resulting high probability of a train wreck in the lame duck session. But he still hopes for the best:

Right around the corner lies the “fiscal cliff.” It offers Congress and the president a golden opportunity to begin a process that will lead to tax reform and, ultimately, deficit reduction.

I keep hearing a lot about “beginning the process that will lead to ….” so I’m getting the feeling that we’re going to see another reset. Which is better than a Grand Bargain any day.

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Thoughts on Iran and climate change

by David Atkins

The folks at Climate Silence saw fit to take this debate tweet of mine and turn it into a photo meme for Facebook.

While it’s incredibly important that Iran not acquire a nuclear weapon for a variety of reasons, there’s also a dark irony that as a byproduct we’re also trying to stop Iran from having nuclear energy for domestic needs, while encouraging them to spew more carbon in the air and deliver up their oil fields to multinational corporations.

This is why a combination of powerful multinational corporations and short-sighted, jockeying nation-states will destroy the world unless humanity doesn’t graduate to something slightly more proactive and sane.

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QOTD: Very Serious Paul Ryan

by digby

To people who wear tri-corner hats and run around pretending they are channeling the founders, this might make sense:

“To compare modern American battleships and Navy with bayonets, I just don’t understand that comparison … the president’s—all these defense cuts, if all these defense cuts go through, our Navy will be smaller than it was before World War I. That’s not acceptable. And, yes, the ocean hasn’t shrunk. You still have to have enough ships to have a footprint that you need to keep sea lanes open, to keep our strength abroad where it needs to be.”

Maybe we could recommission the ship museum where Romney announced Ryan’s nomination to the ticket:

Oh wait, sorry, wrong video:

I don’t think this line is working for you Paul. I know you just loved “Master and Commander” and all that manly, shiply stuff. And yes, the oceans haven’t shrunk. But military capability has changed and expanded. We don’t need a huge fleet of frigates and battleships anymore. This is obvious even to adolescent Ayn Rand fans.

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The most sickening thing you’ll hear all day

by digby

This is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard:

SCARBOROUGH: “What we’re doing with drones is remarkable: the fact that over the past eight years during the Bush years – when a lot of people brought up some legitimate questions about international law – my God, those lines have been completely eradicated by a drone policy that says: if you’re between 17 and 30, and within a half-mile of a suspect, we can blow you up, and that’s exactly what’s happening . . . . They are focused on killing the bad guys, but it is indiscriminate as to other people who are around them at the same time . . . . it is something that will cause us problems in the coming years” . . . .

KLEIN: “I completely disagree with you. . . . It has been remarkably successful” —

SCARBOROUGH: “at killing people” —

KLEIN: “At decimating bad people, taking out a lot of bad people – and saving Americans lives as well, because our troops don’t have to do this . . . You don’t need pilots any more because you do it with a joystick in California.”

SCARBOROUGH: “This is offensive to me, though. Because you do it with a joystick in California – and it seems so antiseptic – it seems so clean – and yet you have 4-year-old girls being blown to bits because we have a policy that now says: ‘you know what? Instead of trying to go in and take the risk and get the terrorists out of hiding in a Karachi suburb, we’re just going to blow up everyone around them.’

“This is what bothers me. . . . We don’t detain people any more: we kill them, and we kill everyone around them. . . . I hate to sound like a Code Pink guy here. I’m telling you this quote ‘collateral damage’ – it seems so clean with a joystick from California – this is going to cause the US problems in the future.”

KLEIN: “If it is misused, and there is a really major possibility of abuse if you have the wrong people running the government. But: the bottom line in the end is – whose 4-year-old get killed? What we’re doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.”

Am I wrong or did Klein say that he thinks killing 4 year olds is legitimate because it “limits the possibility “that 4 year old American will get killed? Holy Moley. That’s so far beyond the concept of self-defense he’s veering into simple pathology.

Klein tends to slip up and inadvertently spill the beans about what our foreign policy elite (of which he is one) really think. Now, I would guess that he was trying to fudge here and say that it was too bad that 4 year olds got killed but “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” But the truth that slipped out was that he believes we are killing their 4 year olds as part of a campaign of terror. And, for him, the good news is that we can do it with a joystick in California. That’s sick.

Now, I doubt very seriously that anyone’s targeting 4 year olds at the moment. Even I am not that cynical. But I also don’t doubt that there are people who believe that if the 4 year olds of “those people” are killed it will wear down the enemy and make them cry uncle. It sure sounds to me like Joe Klein is one of them.

Greenwald dismantles the argument, showing that Klein’s formulation results in exactly the opposite of what he claims to want. I’m so repelled by the fact that anyone would blithely remark that such a “trade-off” in this situation is remotely moral that I can’t get past it.

Update: Here’s Robert Gibbs saying that kids of terrorists should have more responsible fathers. For real.
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Remember when Rove sent Bush to California in the last week of the 2000 campaign?

by digby

With the “news” that Romney’s now going to contest Pennsylvania, I think it’s a good day to reprise this moldy oldie of mine from 2007:

Karl Rove really only had one “insight” (if you can call it that): some people will vote for you if they perceive you are a winner — the bandwagon effect. He won elections through the clever manipulation of the media with lots of talk about “the math” and inevitability and his own mystique. When he was riding the 90’s zeitgeist in red Texas, it worked. When he had to run nationally, not so much, but he still tried even in the face of his ignominious defeat in 2006.

I was referring there to Rove’s very foolish decision to send Bush to California in the last days of the 2000 campaign in order to fake out the Gore campaign. By doing so, he neglected Florida. And we all know what happened. The Supremes saved his bacon — and if Jebbie hadn’t been able to manipulate the voting processes, we would probably have never heard from Karl Rove again.

But that didn’t happen, did it?

Rove long ago convinced Bush that he can continue in Iraq as long as the American people think we are “winning.” It tracks with his own belief in the bandwagon effect and it’s backed up by some academics who have advised the White House that “staying the course” is possible as long as they handle the PR effectively.

In shaping their message, White House officials have drawn on the work of Duke University political scientists Peter D. Feaver and Christopher F. Gelpi, who have examined public opinion on Iraq and previous conflicts. Feaver, who served on the staff of the National Security Council in the early years of the Clinton administration, joined the Bush NSC staff about a month ago as special adviser for strategic planning and institutional reform.

Feaver and Gelpi categorized people on the basis of two questions: “Was the decision to go to war in Iraq right or wrong?” and “Can the United States ultimately win?” In their analysis, the key issue now is how people feel about the prospect of winning. They concluded that many of the questions asked in public opinion polls — such as whether going to war was worth it and whether casualties are at an unacceptable level — are far less relevant now in gauging public tolerance or patience for the road ahead than the question of whether people believe the war is winnable.

“The most important single factor in determining public support for a war is the perception that the mission will succeed,” Gelpi said in an interview yesterday.

They think the same thing applies to political campaigns.

Just saying — the media are once again behaving like the willing dupes they are, running around chasing every shiny object the Republicans throw up. If the bandwagon effect works this time, great. And if it doesn’t they always have a back-up. After all, they won the last close one by setting up an expectation that wasn’t realized and then claiming it proved the election was being stolen out from under them. (Rove had a long history there, as well.) Why not try it again?

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Debate debate

by digby

So, I’m hearing this morning that despite the fact that President Obama cleearly won last night’s foreign policy debate, he actually lost:

Josh Marshall tweeted that reporter friends of his are saying Mitt’s playing 12 dimensional chess. I guess that makes sense since he has basically morphed himself into Obama 08 in these debates. (Yes he can!)

The right wingers are working the refs big time as you can see by this exchange I had last week with Jeff Greenfield:

Today’s update:

Yes indeed. Michael Tomasky writes about this in his piece this morning:

Today may be the most important single day of the campaign. Obama won the debate. Everyone this side of Charles Krauthammer agrees that Romney was general and platitudinous and not that engaged. That makes two out of three. You might think that would mean momentum. And yet the conventional wisdom is congealing right now—it is hardening this morning, minute by minute—that Romney is going to win the election.

From Playbook, which distills the c.w.: President Obama won last night’s foreign-policy debate on substance, in snap polls and with the pundits, but Mitt Romney did well enough that for the first time in six years, Romney folks emailed, “We’re going to win.”

In reality, Obama is the favorite. The state maps still make him so. Nate Silver, the only person who takes every single poll into account (plus loads of other indicators), still has him so. This emerging c.w. is built more on spin and smell, which the media are starting to buy. One piece that Mike Allen bought this morning in that Playbook item: A Romney aide told him New Hampshire leans their way.
[…]
At worst from Obama’s perspective, the thing is tied. As far as we know, looking at all the averages, on a state-by-state basis he’s ahead. If you assume seven or eight states in play and go through all the permutations, Obama often wins by taking just two or three of them. Yes, a lot hinges on Ohio. But he can win even without it (he needs a strong inside straight, but it’s possible). Romney absolutely cannot.

Conservatives know all this. But they’re constructing an opposite reality. This is at the heart of everything going on right now, I think. It’s what they can do that liberals can’t really do. They’ve always done it. “Romney is going to win” in 2012 isn’t so different from “We’ll be hailed as liberators” in 2003. They say something and try to make it so, and the media go for it time and time again.

And… they are.

This is the right’s great advantage. They have their own media, (which the Democrats stupidly validate every chance they get) and they have a boatload of professional spinmeisters ready to instantly hit the talking points. They have been at this for a very long time and they are probably better at doing it than anything else — especially governing.

To me, it was clear that Obama won the debate. He was much more fluent on the issues, and obviously truly engaged. This is what he cares about. Indeed, everyone should remember that until the fall of 2008, domestic issues weren’t at the top of the list and Obama made his bones on his foreign policy promise. The country was looking for someone who would get us out of the stinking mess Bush’s bellicose neocons had created. It was only toward the end that everyone focused on the economy and frankly, Obama had a steep learning curve. Luckily for him (and the world) McCain was simply unintelligible.

Now, there’s no doubt his vision has shifted. It’s not that he didn’t say the same things, (people always thought he was more of a peacenik than he clearly said he was.) But he is now fully engaged in a series of covert wars than simply didn’t show up on the radar screen in 2008. (Or, really, in the campaign of 2012.) It’s different than Bush’s loud and boisterous muscle flexing, to be sure. But it’s also different than what a lot of liberals thought they were getting.

None of that seems to be salient in this campaign. I have no idea what Mitt really thinks about foreign policy, but the fact that he has the entire neo-con establishment (including psychopaths like John Bolton!) advising him, tells me that it will not go well. I’m guessing covert wars, plus Iran and God knows what else. (Covert action just isn’t as satisfying as “projecting strength” through chest pounding.)

Romneybot One, which was online until the first debate, makes Dick Cheney look like Dennis Kucinich. Romneybot Two seems to be trying to be Dennis Kucinich. (All that talk about “peace” last night much have made the hardcore wingnuts shrivel up like raisins.) But the handlers know that they’re (finally) in the bag which allows Mitt to pretend to be kinder and gentler in order to corral a few stray women and drag himself over the line.

Most importantly, in the final stage of any campaign, they always go for the bandwagon effect. They even go to great lengths to fake out the Democrats by playing in states they can’t win and feigning confidence in odd ways. And, needless to say, they are whispering bogus poll numbers in the media’s ear in the hopes of getting them to push the “inevitability” button.

Here you go:

But never fear. Everyone will eventually agree that it’s liberals’ fault for not clapping loud enough. That much we can be sure of.

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