Leave Mary Landrieu Alone!

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by Smitty


Hot Air reports on AFP’s praisworthy ad for Mary Landrieus’s re-election campaign:

For crying out loud, Americans: Mary Landrieu is the MOAST HONEST POLITICIAN EVAR! She openly doesn’t care about the benighted peasants of the swamp that hatched her. She’s an aristocrat now; all full of indigna-tion at the situa-tion of the humilia-tion at the thought of losing the election.

In these trying times, we need to preserve the integrity of the Ruling Class contempt for the serfs out there in flyover. That’s why this blog hopes that the continued repression of reform-minded Americans results in another reliably corrupt Congress on our way to the fabled hothouse in this here handbasket.

21 comments

  1. American Crossroads and Mary Landrieu: isn’t there some way both of these socialist kooks can lose in November?

    American Crossroads is the leftist group started by Karl Rove to save the endangered RINO. It has been the main reason so many weak, flawed, unelectable liberal Republicans got nominated to run for Senate this year.

    If Barack Obama has a free hand in the next two years because of continued Democrat domination of the Senate (or with the connivance of a bevy of squishy reach-across-the-aisle RINOs) you can thank American Crossroads.

    We are soooooo screwed.

  4. I am no fan of Karl, but he is “the main reason so many weak, flawed, unelectable liberal Republicans got nominated to run for Senate this year.” Tell me which candidates got nominated this cycle (which would not have been otherwise) because American Crossroads backed them? The answer to that is probably none.

    That said, if American Crossroads, like a blind pig, produces a decent attack add, hell yes I am going to post it.

    I agree with you that weak Republican candidates are a problem and Karl Rove is more wrong than right, but the establishment GOP existed well before Karl Rove.

  6. She’s aging badly.

    All the quotations they pull are from political professionals. You’d think people who do this for a living would have the sense not to produce sound-bites suitable for oppo-ads. Maybe the shnooks in charge are not much good at electioneering and public relations, either, and are just there because no one else wants to put aside their productive life and work in the Capitol.

  8. Rove is hurting some, like Cotton, by running ads making them look like leftists. Rove’s performance over the last few years tells me that Dubya’s electoral success for POTUS was in spite of Tokyo Rove.

  9. The fact of the matter is, regardless of the hype and resume, the vast majority of politicians are stupid. And they hire stupid people because such cannot do anything else. The political affiliation does not matter. Rather, these are people who have perfected collecting contacts; perfecting the “knowing nod;” honing their “chameleon” personas to the highest level. Smart people don’t do politics; smart people do important things like start businesses; engage in philanthropy with their own money; make money. Politicians are parasites on our system, and our Founders knew that. Which is why they tried to constrain politicians in a box and why the politicians are forever trying to escape it.

  10. Just remember that in 2012 Rove spent just 1% of his campaign support on candidates who actually won elections, Rove’s strength is in fighting Republicans.

  12. I do not see in institutional forms enacted in the late 18th century any features which put ‘politicians’ in a ‘box’. There are no term limits incorporated into the federal constitution (and I think they’re post bellum innovations in state constitutions). The inclination of the federal judiciary to annul legislation was minimal in the antebellum period. The country had delegated powers, but that did not constrain state politicians at all.

    Now, the politicians I’ve known face to face were people of normal intelligence and judgment no worse than any other bourgeois. Of course, they were municipal councillors who were elderly retired or had other work.

    Landrieu is a legacy pol who has not had an ordinary job since she was in her early 30s, i.e. more than a quarter century ago (at which time she was a real estate agent). The politicians may be ‘stupid’, but what about voters who will cast a ballot for someone because their surname is familiar? Presumably, she benefited from her father’s fund raising sources, which is an interesting measure of those sources.

    Federal politicians are not unintelligent on average. They may have poor judgement or be lacking in conscientiousness, but they are not unintelligent. Half the U.S. Senate consists of lawyers. You do not pass the bar if you are not well above the median. Louise Slaughter, who is not adverse to making fatuous remarks, has a master’s degree in microbiology and once worked for a university hospital in laboratory science. The number of people in her cohort (b. 1929) with a post-baccalaureate degree in applied science is in the low single digits.

    It’s about a 50-50 split in Upstate New York. upChuck Schumer is a man without a pre-political occupation; he’s held office continuously since 1975. Kristen Gillibrand actually was a working lawyer between the ages of 25 to 40, but her career gives off a strong whiff of having benefited from opportunities for rent-seeking in the practice of law; he firm was politically connected (one partner was one of Bill Clinton’s lawyers) as well and she has family ties to the Albany Democratic camarilla.

    Brian Higgins, Michael Arcuri, Dan Maffei, Maurice Hinchey, John Sweeney, J.R. Kuhl, John McHugh, Sherwood Boehlert, and (with qualifications, Louise Slaughter and Jack Quinn) are all people for whom politics has been a way of life. Paul Tonko is a mixed type – he was a working engineer into his 40s. However, the rest of the congressional delegation from our area has been composed of people who were working lawyers, merchants, real estate developers, career military, academics, physicians, &c. for a long run of years before taking up elected office full time.

  14. Mary Landrieu is not a Stalinist and Karl Rove is not running a leftist group.

    The trouble with these characters is not that they are red haze ideologues, it’s that they are tribunes for rent-seeking business sectors.

  15. By “constraining Politicians,” I meant constraining the power of the Federal Government over the states and individuals. I think the checks and balances embedded in the Constitution as written demonstrate that. The idea is to create a significant amount of inertia which, along with self-interest among the players, would act as a brake on the normal inclination to increase the government’s control.

    As for the balance of your comment, I didn’t say they lacked degrees or the outward trappings of intelligence. Their cup runneth over which such things. However, to equate those things with actual wisdom is another matter entirely. One needs to look no further than the current administration, filled to the brim with Ivy League credentials to see how well such credentials correlate to making correct decisions.

  16. You made no reference to wisdom. You said ‘the vast majority are stupid’.

    There are stupid men in politics. The most prominent example would be the current Mayor of New York. Most liberal opinion journalists are stupid, and not a few conservative ones, because they’re under the illusion that they have something authoritative to say and that their articulateness is translatable into expertise. I doubt many working politicians are foolish to that degree. Joseph Biden has long been a joke in the press corps, not because he’s the modal type among members of Congress, but because his clownishness actually is unusual.

    Now, the current President and his camarilla were under the illusion that he was in 2006 and appropriate candidate for the office he holds, as were the various and sundry promoting his candidacy. You look at his actual accomplishments since 1983 and you realize he’s an empty suit and that’s not an obscure bit of information. So, BO actually is a locus of stupidity. That’s a problem in the Democratic Party’s culture.

    As for your remarks on ‘the Founders’, I think we ought to avoid confusing certain features of institutional forms with the authors intentions, or thinking that Federalist 10 represents the views of anyone but its author. Our bicameral legislature, to take one example, was a consequence of a compromise between competing plans, not the result of some grand theory. The filibuster was an early 19th c. innovation, not the issue of the constitution itself. And, again, judicial review was a far less consequential determinant of federal policy in 1820 than in 1940. And so forth. When someone says “the founders intended”, their often giving voice to their imagination. (Someone in a forum like this informed me that ‘the Founders intended that the government be dysfunctional’).

  17. “Tell me which candidates got nominated this cycle (which would not have been otherwise) because American Crossroads backed them? The answer to that is probably none.”

    WTF?!?! Are you seriously arguing that American Crossroads had little to do with the GOP primaries this year? You may as well argue that lefty media bias has no real effect on elections.

    These folks dropped some serious bucks into the GOP primary process, and the results – a near clean sweep of the Establishment over the base – speaks for itself (if that evidence is not good enough, then nothing ever will be). And if you can come up with a better explanation for the GOP Establishment’s success in getting its weak candidates nominated – and this on the heels of the massive flame-out of the Establishment’s can’t-lose candidate Mitt Romneycare – then I am all ears. Sometimes you just have to look at the evidence that is smack dab in front of you.

    “That said, if American Crossroads, like a blind pig, produces a decent attack ad, hell yes I am going to post it.”

    That is your choice. Personally I don’t want to do anything that boosts the likes of Rove & Co. I’ll never forget how he spent election night 2012 on Fox News arguing that because the 7th ward of the 69th precinct of the 666th Ohio Congressional district had not yet reported results Romney still had a chance. Even by the low standards of paid political hacks it was embarrassing.

  18. Please answer the question, who did Rove/Am Crossroads back that as a result of that backing resulted in a better candidate losing the nomination. I am serious. I am not saying that to defend Rove. If that exists, let me know.

  20. I read the piece day before yesterday and can’t remember where I saw it now. The gist was that Cotton and others were better supporters of several leftist programs, mostly entitlements.

  21. I agree. This is a heck of an ad. I’ll give Rove et al credit for this one since I more than counterbalance it by blaming them for their multiple, spectacular faceplants.

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