Marco Rubio is not Mr. Science

By Mustang Bobby 

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) declaimed on climate change on Sunday:

"I don't agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists, that somehow there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what's happening in our climate," he said on ABC's "This Week." "Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that's directly and almost solely attributable to manmade activity, I do not agree with that."

ABC's Jonathan Karl pressed Rubio on his belief that humans don't have anything to do with global warming.

"But let me get this straight, you do not think that human activity, its production of CO2, has caused warming to our planet?" Karl asked.

"I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. That's what I do not — and I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it. Except it will destroy our economy," Rubio responded.

To paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Science is real whether you agree with it or not." And it's not a "notion."

As for his comment that doing something to stop climate change "will destroy our economy," that's not going to mean a lot when Miami Beach is under three feet of water and the cruise ships are docking at the Port of Albuquerque.

I know he's doing it just to ingratiate himself to the GOP base — ironically the base that is baking in drought in California and Arizona — but all this does is prove that he's a craven little suck-up and most assuredly not ready to be president no matter what he thinks.

P.S.: The last guy who made that claim based on his years in office was Dan Quayle, and look what happened to him.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Zing! went the strings of my heart

By Mustang Bobby

Debate prep is going ahead at both campaigns:

Mr. Romney's team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August. His strategy includes luring the president into appearing smug or evasive about his responsibility for the economy.

Mr. Obama is not particularly fluid in sound bites, so his team is aiming for a workmanlike performance like his speech at the Democratic convention. He is looking to show that Mr. Romney would drive the country in an extreme ideological direction at odds with the interests of the middle class.

If a presidential candidate is spending time memorizing witty ripostes as opposed to coming up with cogent but brief descriptions of policy ideas and plans, then there's something wrong.

In the first place, a rehearsed zinger is an oxymoron; in order to really work and not sound like something planned out, it has to be spontaneous. Otherwise, it sounds like it was rehearsed thereby loses its punch.

It also leaves the candidate vulnerable to not being ready just in case his opponent comes back with a spontaneous zinger of their own. The most famous of those in real life was the debate between Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 when Sen. Bentsen floored Mr. Quayle with the "you're no Jack Kennedy" line that has entered popular culture.


If these debates are going to mean anything — and that itself is debatable — they have to do more than give us rehearsed zingers and massaged messages that are watered down to nothing more than talking points written by staffers aimed at focus groups, the only difference being that they're delivered by the candidates themselves instead of via Twitter.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Dan Quayle, still stupid after all these years

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Appearing on Fox News (where else?) yesterday, former VP Dan Quayle argued, or "argued," against the use of reconciliation to deal with health-care reform:

They're gonna go to budget reconciliation, which I believe would set a very bad precedent, because essentially -- if they could do it, and I don't know if they can do it, but if they could do it -- what you have done, effectively, is to take away the filibuster in the United States Senate. So, therefore, you have 51 votes in the House and 51 votes in the Senate. That is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. That is not the constitutional process.

Okay. Let's go through that.

First, Democrats don't intend to use reconcilation to pass health-care reform, just to make so-called patches to a bill that both houses of Congress have already passed, including with 60 votes in the Senate.

Second, as TPM's Rachel Slajda notes, George H.W. Bush, Quayle's boss, used reconciliation "regularly." So how would using it now "set a very bad precedent"? Or is only bad when Democrats do it?

Third... 51 votes in the House? D'oh!

Fourth, as Slajda further notes, while the filibuster "seems to have been around since Congress began," it is not mentioned in the Constitution, which "gives both houses of Congress the power to set their own rules." Those rules include not just the filibuster but reconciliation, do they not?

"I would imagine wiser, cooler heads will prevail and this process will not be attempted," Quayle added.

By "wiser, cooler heads" he presumably means fearful Democrats who cave in to Republican objections and demands, and who will let Republicans set the double standard that Quayle seems to want in place: Republicans can do what they want when they want, and use the rules as they see fit, but Democrats can only do what Republicans tell them to do.

Truth in Comics

By Creature


If it's Sunday, it's Truth in Comics.

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)

Palin as Quayle (or, why Palin is nothing like Obama)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In an article posted at TNR yesterday, Jon Chait draws stark and disturbing parallels between Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle. With Palin's record, her alleged "experience," revealed as the facade of lies and deceptions it really is -- as governor of Alaska, "[s]he appointed unqualified cronies, abused her power to punish personal enemies, and has displayed a Cheney-esque passion for government secrecy -- what remains is, in essense, a right-wing tabula rasa open to further right-wing indoctrination.

Quayle, lest we forget, had significantly more experience than Palin, however, notably on the national stage, both in the House and Senate, at the time he was tapped by Bush I as his 1988 running mate. Still, as Chait points out, what Palin's defenders are saying about her now sounds a lot like what Quayle's defenders were saying about him back then. What's more, Quayle, like Palin now, played the all-American populist card against so-called elites on the other side:

Questions about Quayle's readiness remained, but he did his best to turn them into elite condescension toward small town America. Quayle, in his acceptance speech, spoke movingly about the small towns in Indiana where he had grown up, and later disparaged Dukakis for "sneer[ing] at common sense advice, Midwestern advice."

And, also like Palin now, the Quayle pick was celebrated by the right:

Conservatives received Quayle's selection rapturously. L. Brent Bozell pronounced himself "ecstatic," and Jerry Falwell called the surprise pick "a stroke of genius." After a media frenzy, Quayle's speech was well-received. The convention hall burst into cheers of "We want Dan!" NBC anchor Tom Brokaw said that Quayle executed "flawlessly," and CBS's Bruce Morton called it "a good speech."

Sound familiar? It's like 1988 all over again. To a point.

While Biden is very much like Lloyd Bentsen -- both elder statesmen of the Democratic Party -- Biden is by far the better and more accomplished pick. Furthermore, while McCain, like Bush I before him, has a good deal of experience, particularly in terms of foreign policy and national security, the Republican brand is not what it was in 1988, when two Reagan terms and Reagan's own personal popularity created a fertile climate for Bush I's run for the presidency. He was Reagan's vice president, after all. For his part, McCain, also a decorated veteran, enjoys a long history of delusionally positive coverage by the national media, along with the unearned reputation for being some sort of moderate maverick, but, with two wars going on, and with the economy already melting down, and with McCain-Palin running on an extremist social conservative (domestic policy) and neoconservative (foreign policy) platform, and with two Bush II terms creating not a fertile climate but a huge obstacle for McCain's run, the differences between 1988 and 2008 are stark.

And there is another enormous difference: Obama is no Dukakis. Enough said.

**********

But back to Chait's article:

Palin is like Quayle but unlike Obama. Actually, she is worse than Quayle, who had been in the Senate for almost eight years by the time he was elected vice president in 1988. Obama has been in the Senate, too, of course, for less time, but Chait makes the excellent point that it is engagement, not experience, that matters:

The main complaint against Palin has been her lack of experience. That's fortunate for her, since "experience" -- especially measured in a linear way -- fails to capture exactly what Palin lacks. Yes, two years as governor is less than you'd like, as is four years as senator. The real problem, though, is that Palin has no record of thinking about national or international policy. Bobby Jindal, another Republican veep contender, has barely more experience than Palin, but he is a respected policy intellectual. Pat Buchanan ran for president without ever having served in elective office, but he had engaged more deeply than most presidential candidates in policy questions.

Engagement, not experience, is the difference between Palin's qualifications and Obama's. Obama has a longstanding interest in national and (to a lesser extent) international issues, and has answered questions on all those issues in extensive detail. Palin has dealt almost exclusively with parochial issues in a wildly atypical state. (Her fiscal experience, which consists of divvying up oil lucre, offers better preparation to serve as president of Saudi Arabia than the United States.) It's possible Palin has harbored a long-standing, secret passion for policy wonkery, but the few signs available thus far -- her convention speech that spelled out "new-clear weapons," her evident lack of familiarity with the term "Bush Doctrine" -- suggest otherwise. The Republican intelligentsia is frantically tutoring her while they run out the clock until November 4.

What Obama has shown throughout this long campaign is that he has not just multifaceted experience -- lawyer, community activist, state legislator, senator -- but a long history of engagement with the major issues of the day, with the challenges facing America and the world. He has proven that he has the temperament and judgement to be president, and, on the issues, he is the right candidate at the right time, the man both America and the world need in the White House.

Palin is a lot like Quayle, and 2008 is a lot like 1988, but it is Obama who makes all the difference.