Nine Republican candidates will be debating in Orlando, Florida (Fox News , 9 p.m.) tonight and, rather than live-blogging, I’ll be aggregating and occasionally updating.
UPDATE 9:25 p.m. ET: After the first commercial break, I think Herman Cain’s winning decisively so far. (Because I said so, that’s why.)
UPDATE 9:35 p.m. ET: Herman Cain just proposed eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency. Also, he correctly pronounced Chile: Chee-LAY.
He was praising Chile’s private retirement program, but I think he was also showing off the fact that he knows how to pronounce Chee-LAY.
UPDATE 11:15 p.m. ET: Frank Luntz couldn’t get his video clips to play during the focus group, but said that Perry’s “you have no heart” comment about illegal immigration was very badly received. Rick Santorum’s retort to Perry was very sharp. Overall, Mitt Romney was perceived as the winner, and Brett Baier had positive things to say about Herman Cain’s performance. (Chee-LAY!) Also: Gary Johnson’s dogs.
Perry’s answer is a transparent dodge, of course, and Santorum rightly calls him on it. The question isn’t whether children of illegals should be educated, it’s whether they should be subsidized by taxpayers with in-state tuition rates.
“In Ohio, which McGovern eventually lost by a slim 19,000 vote margin, his handlers figure perhaps 10,000 of those were directly attributable to his public association with Warren Beatty, who once told a reporter somewhere that he favored legalizing grass. This was picked up by that worthless a–hole Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) and turned into a major issue.
“So it fairly boggles the mind to think what Humphrey’s people might do with a photo of McGovern shaking hands with a person who once ran for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, with a platform embracing the use and frequent enjoyment of Mescaline by the Sheriff and all his Deputies at any hour of the day or night that seemed Right.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
Guilt-by-association smears are an ever-present danger in political life, and my carefully cultivated bad reputation probably keeps me from scoring some “exclusives” I might otherwise get. But the upside is that there is no one trying to tempt me through the revolving door that separates journalism from politics.
No Republican, not even Herman Cain, could get away with hiring me as a “media consultant” or “communications strategist” or some other type of glorified P.R. gig, so there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that I’ll ever become Jay Carney, and thank God for that.
Nor is it likely that I’ll be invited onto one of Sean Hannity’s “Great American” panels, because the executives at Fox News understand that their on-air choices are seen as officially symbolic of Conservatism, Inc. Every sin committed by Roger Ailes is somehow blamed on the GOP, and so even if I were as telegenic as Megyn Kelly, they’d never invite me to do the pundit gig on Fox. I’d stand a better chance of becoming a regular contributor on Rachel Maddow’s show.
What Tucker can’t seem to bring himself to admit is that about 10 minutes worth of careful editing would have put Jeff Poor’s article into the safety zone where not even the most zealous Palinista, nor even Sarah Palin herself, would have had any cause to complain:
Mike Tyson Targets Sarah Palin
in Obscene Sexual, Racial Rant
Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson engaged in a lurid and lengthy sexual rant about Sarah Palin during an interview broadcast on a Las Vegas radio station.
Referring to unsubstantiated claims in a new book that the former Alaska governor once dated former professional basketball player Glenn Rice, Tyson fantasized at length about Palin having sex with another former NBA player, Dennis Rodman. Both Rice and Rodman are black, and Tyson made graphic reference to racial stereotypes as he asked KWWV-AM hosts Paul Howard, Mitch Moss and Seat Williams to “imagine Palin with a big old black stallion.”
Tyson, who was convicted in 1992 of raping a teenage beauty pageant contestant, asserted that Palin “needed” to have sex with a black man, an experience he said “every white girl” desires in order to “get that out of their system.”
“Every uppity white middle class [woman says] . . . ‘Gotta get me a black man before I go prosper in this white world,'” Tyson said during the interview, provoking hysterical laughter from the hosts of the “Gridlock” program on the ESPN Radio affiliate station.
Saying he had read Joe McGinniss’s new “unauthorized biography” of the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, Tyson said, “Isn’t that beautiful to hear Palin [had sex with] a black man? . . . Her and her sister were into that stuff.” . . .
An article written that way might have included a sentence to the effect, “A spokesman for Governor Palin did not respond to a request for comment on Tyson’s remark.” And that kind of article could have led to a discussion of harm that results from such stereotypical attitudes.
Instead, we have Tucker Carlson trying to defend the legitimacy of a bad editorial judgment. And there are multiple layers of irony in the fact that I’m the guy pointing this out. Chief among the several ironies is this: When I was on the national desk at The Washington Times, I was always the “loose cannon” in the newsroom testing the boundaries of what could be printed in our “family-friendly” newspaper. Go ask Ken Hanner, Victor Morton or Geoff Etnyre how many times as an assistant editor I got chewed out for sending to the copy desk articles that got flagged as including language that senior editors disapproved.
Given that background, I can empathize with the predicament that Jeff Poor and Tucker Carlson have found themselves in, but cannot for the life of me understand Carlson’s defense. He seems to have the idea that Greta Van Susteren (and Tammy Bruce and Jedadiah Bila and everyone else who objected to the Tyson article) somehow expected the Daily Caller to ignore this incident. Carlson is pretending that the only way to report the story was the way that Jeff Poor reported it.
Allegations that the article represents an anti-Palin attitude — or a “boys club” environment — at the Daily Caller could be dismissed if Carlson would admit that the article, as originally published, was gratuitously offensive.
Of course, I have at times been accused of writing gratuitously offensive things on my blog, but that’s just me. This blog is not a publishing company into which people were invited to invest millions of dollars to create the “conservative answer to the Huffington Post,” which was Tucker Carlson’s original selling point for the Daily Caller. When I responded to Carlson’s boastful May 2009 announcement by saying that his proposed project “better not suck,” I scarcely expected that by September 2011, the Daily Caller would be accused by Greta Van Susteren of inciting sexual violence against women. Nor did I expect I’d be laughing myself to tears over Richard McEnroe’s “Downfall” parody:
And if you feel an urge to hit the tip jar — hey, don’t fight the feeling!
The original article is neutrally written. There is not a suggestion of the writer’s belief that Mike Tyson is out-of-bounds, not a word of criticism for the ESPN radio hosts for taking the interview here. . . .
Sometimes it’s hard to read tone, but the sense I got from the original piece was that the best jokes were being highlighted. . . .
Locker-room sex stuff. And just in case it isn’t already risque enough, Tyson starts throwing in some weird racial stuff, too.
Which is, I think, perhaps unfair to Jeff Poor. I know Jeff Poor, who did good work for Newsbusters, and don’t believe that he quoted Tyson’s remarks with an idea of derogating Palin.
What I actually think is that a lot of younger people, accustomed to watching Comedy Central where this kind of “humor” is commonplace, take it for granted. And in the Internet age, where everything is just one Google search away, it might seem that there is no harm in repeating whatever is already “out there.” Tucker Carlson is 10 years younger than me, and Jeff Poor is also young, and this is probably the reason why they reacted to the criticism the way they did.
The blog-war aspect of this incident rather dwindles into insignficance when measured against the apparent willingness of a Las Vegas radio station to allow Mike Tyson to spew such filthy and derogatory racial stereotypes.
And I still wish that was the focus of discussion: Why did these radio sports-talk guys raise this Palin question with Mike Tyson, then laugh at his response as if it were the funniest thing they’d ever heard? You don’t have to be a prude or a women’s studies major to be stunned by what Ace euphemistically calls the “weird racial stuff” in Tyson’s diatribe. A thorough discussion of that, however, would require mining another layer of irony I’d rather not deal with this afternoon, so I’ll content myself to quote my original reaction:
Now that I think of it, have we heard from Jill Filipovic, Jessica Valenti, Melissa McEwan or any of the other feminists? Because if Sarah Palin weren’t a Republican, I think they’d probably be outraged by this.
The damage to The Daily Caller is enormous. . . . This is a disaster compounded by the folks at The Daily Caller digging while in a hole, and digging even harder when people called them out on it, and doubling down on the digging as it went viral.
It’s hard to be sympathetic to Newt Gingrich, but his remarks about campaign staffers and/or consultants who talked trash anonymously to reporters are worth hearing:
(From Mediaite with a Twitter hat-tip to Matt Lewis.) Why would anyone hire a consultant or staffer who backstabbed his last boss?
Khloe Kardashian appeared on “Fox & Friends” for just over 6 minutes this morning … with her right nipple in FULL VIEW the entire time!!! . . .
Nobody on the set seemed to notice — but tons of viewers did … and they bombarded Khloe’s Twitter account with messages about the nip slip.
After the interview — Khloe tweeted back … saying, “I had a nip slip and I loved it!” She added, “Thank God! I f**king love nipples!!!!”
OK, I know you’re saying to yourself: “What is this silly story doing on a right-wing political blog?”
Earlier this month, Fox News ended its contracts with GOP presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. The network also reportedly delivered an ultimatum to Mike Huckabee that he, too, must decide: Either give up his Fox show or disavow a 2012 presidential run.
When Sarah Palin chose then to continue her contract with Fox, I deduced that she had decided not to be a candidate in 2012. Three weeks later, however, observers have started chattering over several signals that Palin may decide to jump into the race soon. Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times summarize the developments:
Sarah Palin is fortifying her small staff of advisers, buying a house in Arizona — where associates have said she could base a national campaign — and reviving her schedule of public appearances. The moves are the most concrete signals yet that Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska, is seriously weighing a Republican presidential bid.
While it is by no means clear that she would be willing to give up her lucrative speaking career and her perch as an analyst on Fox News to face the scrutiny and combat that would come with her entrance into the race, she is being pressed by supporters for a decision and has acknowledged that time is running out.
The latest polls show Romney and Palin virtually neck-and-neck among GOP voters. The problem for Palin now is that Romney has been virtually running since 2008, and that the primary field is now crowded by other candidates who’ve spent the past seven months lining up staff and volunteers in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and other states. The longer she waits, the slimmer the pickings would be when she finally does get in (if she does). Scott Conroy of Real Clear Politics appeared on CBS to discuss the possible Palin campaign:
Doug Brady notes the dismissive attitude of CBS’s Jan Crawford, “a now-familiar mainstream media narrative that’s as predictable as it is delusional.” This narrative — that Palin is damaged goods who would be a certain loser against Obama in 2012 — can only be disproven in one way: By Palin getting into the campaign, winning the GOP nomination, and getting elected in November 2012.
The question, then: How badly does Palin want to disprove that narrative?
Sean Hannity complained to [Fox News programming chief] Bill Shine about Beck. And it didn’t help matters that O’Reilly, who had become friends with Beck and can’t stand Hannity, scheduled Beck as a regular guest, a move that only annoyed Hannity further.
(Via Memeorandum.) That O’Reilly has always viewed Hannity as a rival is hardly a secret to people in the business.
As the network’s top primetime star, O’Reilly claims the right of first refusal on any big exclusive interviews: If you are a publicist who wants your client to appear on O’Reilly’s show, you’d better not schedule an interview with Hannity first, because that will be viewed as a betrayal of O’Reilly. And knowing themselves to have this power, O’Reilly’s producers do not hesitate to manipulate guests — hinting at the possibility of a “Factor” appearance, on a wait-and-see basis — to the frustration of these would-be guests and their P.R. people, who are left hanging on such hints.
However, to learn that O’Reilly was using Beck as a weapon to snub Hannity — and that Beck permitted himself to be used to those ends — adds something new to our understanding of the often-toxic behind-the-scenes rivalry among Fox’s primetime hosts.
BTW, I don’t doubt that people at Fox will dispute the accuracy of Sherman’s article, and they may dispute this particular item. However, the O’Reilly-Beck-Hannity angle matches what I already knew about the situation, so I’m willing to believe it is reasonably close to truth.
UPDATE: Whew! That was scary! Allahpundit had an open thread at Hot Air. If you watched it live on Fox, you know how Huck started talking about polls and his supporters and how he was praying and — for a minute there, I admit it — I was feelin’ the doom. And then he said, “no,” and I was like, “YES!”
Mike Huckabee said Saturday there would be no sequel to his surprisingly strong 2008 White House bid, in which he won the Iowa Republican caucus and finished second in the primaries to Sen. John McCain.
“All the factors say go, but my heart says no,” Huckabee, who was considered the GOP frontrunner in several national polls, said on his Fox News Channel show.
Huckabee noted that while all of the “external” factors pointed toward him running, he only found an “inexplicable inner peace” when he decided not to enter the race.
Tim Pawlenty. He becomes the evangelical governor in the race.
Herman Cain. He remains the Huckabee of 2012.
Sarah Palin. She and Huckabee would largely be fighting for the same crowd.
Well, if Palin wants in for 2012, now would be the time to do it. I dislike the “Huckabee of 2012” label for Cain, whatever that is supposed to mean. And as for Tim Pawlenzzzzzzzz . . .
It couldn’t have been easy for former governor Mike Huckabee to reach the decision not to run for president of the United States of America in 2012, seeing your beloved county heading down the wrong path naturally forces men of character to act, and we here at Citizens 4 Cain salute the Governor for his courageous decision and wish him all the best in every future endeavor. . . . Although supporters will be a bit disappointed in Huck’s decision and may need some time to process – Citizens 4 Cain would like to cordially extend an invitation to any and all Mike Huckabee supporters to join our Grassroots Army for Herman Cain here at Citizens 4 Cain.
