September 7, 2012

Weird Republican Outrage Watch

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Andrew Sullivan just put up a post that happens to include a video of Marco Rubio making a joke a couple of years ago about a blizzard-induced power outage in Washington DC: “The president,” he said, “couldn’t find anywhere to set up a teleprompter to announce new taxes.” It got big yuks from the CPAC crowd.

Anyway, this reminded me of something: Republicans sure have a lot of bizarrely puerile criticisms of President Obama, don’t they? I don’t mean big policy stuff. I’m not talking about death panels or EPA regulations or Dodd-Frank or any of that. I’m talking about things like this:

  • The endless outrage over his return of a Winston Churchill bust that the British government had loaned to George W. Bush.
  • The never-gets-old tittering over his use of a teleprompter.
  • The talk-radio jihad against the Chevy Volt.
  • The indignation over Michelle Obama’s effort to get kids to eat better.

This stuff is just weird. I guess there must have been similarly juvenile stuff that animated liberals back when Bush was president, but what? Pretzel jokes?

DOES IT FEEL LIKE POLITICS IS AT A BREAKING POINT?

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It sure feels that way to me, and here at Mother Jones, we’ve been thinking a lot about what journalism needs to do differently, and how we can have the biggest impact.

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We aim to hire, build a team, and give them the time and space needed to understand how we got here and how we might get out. We want to dig into the forces and decisions that have allowed massive conflicts of interest, influence peddling, and win-at-all-costs politics to flourish.

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Signed by Clara Jeffery

Clara Jeffery, Editor-in-Chief

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