The question is: Do I even deserve to live if I can’t beat Mitt Romney? And I don’t think I do, really. That’s why I’ll more than likely be packing a little gun with me on election night. Because the sooner I can end it all, the less pain I’ll feel.
I mean, wouldn’t you kill yourself if the U.S. population felt that Mitt Romney—a man who basically wrote off half the American population as entitled victims incapable of taking care of themselves—was a more viable leader than you? Wouldn’t you take your own life if a massive segment of the citizenry basically said, “You know what, you ended the war in Iraq, you passed health care reform, you saved the auto industry, you repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, you had 32 straight months of job creation, and you killed Osama bin Laden, but sorry, I’m going with Romney”?
Of course you would. Just reading that sentence makes me want to reach for my pen right now and jab myself in the throat over and over and over again. Hell, I considered killing myself last week when Colorado and Virginia suddenly became a toss up. The first African-American president in the history of the United States loses his reelection bid to none other than…Mitt Romney. Mitt fucking Romney. The only way I could look at myself in the mirror if that happened would be if there were a cocked shotgun lodged in my mouth.
I hope you don’t think I’m overreacting. In fact, I think my attitude is just about right. Mitt Romney spent the past year blaming me for setting a withdrawal date for our troops to leave Afghanistan, but then in our last debate he not only set a withdrawal date himself, but picked one that was identical to mine—2014. Nobody seems to give a fuck about that. And that must mean nobody really gives a fuck about me. It’s like I’m living in the goddamn Twilight Zone and nothing I’ve done matters at all. Look, a world in which people believe Mitt Romney is a better communicator than me is a world I don’t want to live in. So that’s why I’ll either hang myself in the Lincoln Bedroom or slit my wrists right there in the middle of the Oval Office. I haven’t decided which yet.
This is decreasingly surprising, but Al Jazeera is picking up where the more traditional American news organizations are failing. In this case, I’m referring to our third-party presidential candidates — I know! Can you believe we have those? — and the debate they held last night in Chicago:
Tuesday’s debate was hosted by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, a group promoting a more open electoral process, and moderated by talk show host Larry King.
“It’s a two-party system, but not a two-party system by law,” King said. Obama and Romney were also invited, but declined to attend.
The participants included former Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson, former Virginia congressman Virgil Goode, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, who ran against Romney in Massachusetts in 2002.
When asked about the Pentagon’s budget, during the debate, all four candidates agreed that military spending should be cut. Goode was perhaps the most circumspect; the other candidates called for big cuts.
For instance, Johnson said military spending should be cut by 43 per cent.
Goode, who voted to authorise the war in Iraq in 2003, said: “If I’m elected president … part of the cuts have to be in the Deparmtent of Defence. We cannot do as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan suggest. I support a strong defence but we need to retrench rather than being the policeman of the world.”
In response, Johnson said: “The biggest threat to our national security is the fact that we’re bankrupt.” He supports a 43 per cent reduction in military spending – 2003 spending levels, he pointed out.
Stein, the Green Party nominee, said: “A foreign policy based on militarism … is making us less secure, not more secure. We need to cut the budget and bring the troops home.”
I have to say, I really like the tenor of these statements, even if I’m not personally persuaded yet that, say, a 43% military budget reduction is exactly what we need to do at the moment. (I’m not a priori against it, either. But 43% is a very big number.)
It’s truly a shame that the only networks to broadcast the event live were Al Jazeera and Russia Today.
How this piece ever made its way to publication is a question for which there is no possible good answer. Now, brought to you by the “You Completely, Deliberately, and Entirely Unconvincingly Missed the Point” Department:
President Obama might want to drop his attacks on Mitt Romney’s “Romnesia.” During Monday’s foreign-policy debate, Obama sarcastically informed the governor about “these things called aircraft carriers” and “ships that go underwater.” For one, voters in Norfolk, Va., and Groton, Conn., might tell the president that ships that “go underwater” are sunk, but boats that go underwater are called submarines.
But the president’s condescending dismissal of criticism about defense budget cuts — noting that today’s military has “fewer horses and bayonets” — also was a gaffe. Land combat soldiers and Marines train with bayonets and still use them in battle when other weapons fail. What’s more, perhaps it was a case of “Obamnesia” that accounts for the president’s failure to remember the indispensible role that horses played in the early days of war in Afghanistan.
Somehow President Obama forgot that on November 11, 2011, Vice President Joe Biden was present at the unveiling of the magnificent 16-foot Horse Soldier Memorial in New York City. During the 2011 Veterans Day parade, members of the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) marched down New York’s Fifth Avenue toward a dedication ceremony that was made possible by donors who had raised $750,000.
The New York Times‘ Steven Erlanger, like most of the rest of us that watched last night’s unmoderated monologue-fest, is unimpressed:
In general, there was a sense among analysts and observers outside the United States that these were two intelligent, competent candidates, who do not differ overly much on key issues of foreign policy, and were actually debating with domestic constituencies in swing states foremost in mind.
The debate over Iran and Israel was really about Jewish voters in states like Florida, while the debate over China was really about jobs in Ohio and the Midwest, noted François Heisbourg, a special adviser at the Foundation for Strategic Research, based in Paris. And that makes perfect sense in a tight American presidential election, where most voters do not consider foreign policy a priority, Mr. Heisbourg said.
“The balance was more toward 9/11 than the pivot to Asia,” Mr. Heisbourg said. “There was more about risks and threats than friends and allies. Both spoke in a Hobbesian world as tough characters willing to deal with monsters out there, not as people spreading the gospel of working with friends and allies to make the world a better place or spreading U.S. influence to help people get along.”
Le Monde said on its Web site, “For each question, the two candidates came back to the economic situation of the country, proof that this is the electorate’s main preoccupation.”
Mr. Obama even spoke of China as an “adversary,” although he said it was also “a potential partner in the international community if it’s following the rules.” Mr. Romney said essentially the same thing, speaking of confrontation over trade and not about working with China on issues like North Korea, Pakistan and Iran. For Mr. Heisbourg, “Both were wrong on China, portraying it as an adversary, but each got the message across about defending jobs in Ohio.”
First comes Christopher Benfey at the New York Review of Books, whose glowing praise for Barack Obama is exceeded only by his palpable disgust for Mitt Romney:
I have no idea what Clint Eastwood had in mind when he dragged an empty chair up to the stage at the Republican Convention in Tampa last August. Maybe he was thinking, as some have suggested, of some bygone exercise in a Lee Strasberg acting class. “Please, Clint. Talk to the chair. You are Hamlet and the chair is Ophelia. Please. Just talk to her.” Or maybe a marriage counselor had used an empty chair to teach the tight-lipped gunslinger from Carmel how to empathize with his wife. “Go ahead, Clint, make her day. Tell her what you’re feeling.”
I was thinking of that empty chair in Tampa as I watched Tuesday’s presidential debate at Hofstra University. I was thinking what our country would be like, what the world would be like, without Barack Obama seated in the Oval Office. That’s the empty chair that keeps me awake at night…
The tragic dimension is there in the President’s face and in his shoulders. It was there, visibly there, in his performance in the first debate—not “lackluster,” as it was widely described, but burdened, bedeviled, fraught. Not for nothing did he invoke, and quite rightly, Abraham Lincoln. During the second debate, he was more combative, confrontational, locked in. But what came through most strongly was the contrast between Romney’s vacuous claim to care for 100 percent of all Americans (since we’re all “children of the same God,” he can apparently include even the 47 percent who are moochers), and the detailed ways, the detailed policies, in which Obama has actually shown that he cares for all of us.
Yeah, I’d say it’s a bit over the top, especially for the New York Review of Books, whose essays are generally more thoughtful and less, shall we say, obsequious. Fortunately, the New Yorker‘s endorsement of the president was substantially more nuanced:
Perhaps inevitably, the President has disappointed some of his most ardent supporters. Part of their disappointment is a reflection of the fantastical expectations that attached to him. Some, quite reasonably, are disappointed in his policy failures (on Guantánamo, climate change, and gun control); others question the morality of the persistent use of predator drones. And, of course, 2012 offers nothing like the ecstasy of taking part in a historical advance: the reëlection of the first African-American President does not inspire the same level of communal pride. But the reëlection of a President who has been progressive, competent, rational, decent, and, at times, visionary is a serious matter. The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration. Obama has renewed the honor of the office he holds…
One quality that so many voters admired in Obama in 2008 was his unusual temperament: inspirational, yet formal, cool, hyper-rational. He promised to be the least crazy of Presidents, the least erratic and unpredictable. The triumph of that temperament was in evidence on a spring night in 2011, as he performed his duties, with a standup’s precision and preternatural élan, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, all the while knowing that he had, with no guarantee of success, dispatched Navy seal Team Six to kill bin Laden. In the modern era, we have had Presidents who were known to seduce interns (Kennedy and Clinton), talk to paintings (Nixon), and confuse movies with reality (Reagan). Obama’s restraint has largely served him, and the country, well.
But Obama is also a human being, a flawed and complicated one, and as the world has come to know him better we have sometimes seen the downside of his temperament: a certain insularity and self-satisfaction; a tendency at times—as in the first debate with Mitt Romney—to betray disdain for the unpleasant tasks of politics. As a political warrior, Obama can be withdrawn, even strangely passive. He has sometimes struggled to convey the human stakes of the policies he has initiated. In the remaining days of the campaign, Obama must be entirely, and vividly, present, as he was in the second debate with Romney. He must clarify not only what he has achieved but also what he intends to achieve, how he intends to accelerate the recovery, spur employment, and allay the debt crisis; how he intends to deal with an increasingly perilous situation in Pakistan; what he will do if Iran fails to bring its nuclear program into line with international strictures. Most important, he needs to convey the larger vision that matches his outsized record of achievement.
