Wednesday was one of those Hell Days that remind me why people told me I was crazy for even trying to cover the presidential campaign in such an improvisational low-budget manner.
The cheapest modes of transportation are seldom the most convenient. But I’ll spare you the nerve-wracking details of why I was in transit (and thus offline) for more than 12 hours, except for the few minutes it took to dash off a single blog post.
However, during a frantic day of desperate haste, there were certain moments of serenity. I was racing from Tampa toward Jacksonville in the rented Impala and talking on the phone to my editor at The American Spectator when I heard the rented GPS unit (an extra $10.99 a day) say: “Re-calculating.”
“Uh-oh,” I told my editor. “I think I just missed my exit.”
And I was unfortunately right. The GPS “re-calculated” that I should drive to another exit 17 miles north, but before I got that far, there was an exit with a billboard promising the joys of “Jim’s BBQ,” and I was hungry, so I got off at that exit instead. My nerves were so jangled at that point, I needed some time to get my head together anyway. Service at Jim’s BBQ was kind of slow, but while I waited for my order, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and enjoy the Florida sun.
Within a few minutes, the order was ready and I got back in the car with my sandwich, chips and large sweet tea, happy to discover that the GPS had once more re-calculated to determine that this exit would do just fine — just drive eight miles east on Marion County Road 318.
What a lovely drive it was. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that some clever landscape architect had designed the scenery along County Road 318. Live oaks draped with Spanish moss shaded the route, overarching the road in a picturesque canopy. If a busload of Japanese tourists had taken this scenic byway, they’d have shot 437 gigabytes of photos and videos in the 10 minutes it took to drive from Jim’s BBQ to the crossroads town of Hawthorne.
By the time I turned left and headed north on U.S. 301, I’d finished my sandwich and was in a much mellower mood, sipping my sweet tea, and searched the radio dial until I found an Ocala talk radio station. Rush Limbaugh was talking about the ginned-up media furor over something semi-stupid Mitt Romney said on CNN:
“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
OK, semi-stupid, but politicians say much stupider things every day. And Rush explained that people were trying to turn this into The Greatest Gaffe Ever. It wasn’t until many hours later that I got home and saw the ginormous Memeorandum aggregation showing how many people were hyperventilating themselves into a coma over this, among them Erick Erickson:
The National Review’s Candidate
Won’t Stop Digging
Yeah, wow. Candidates who say stupid stuff on TV? I could name three reasons why nobody should ever support such a candidate, but . . . oops. And there was also this news:
BREAKING NEWS: Trump to Endorse
Newt Gingrich Tomorrow
How many influential conservatives now supporting Newt have previously denounced Donald Trump as a scurrilous, untrustworthy, publicity-seeking fraud? The number is certainly larger than zero, but we will now be expected to forget about those earlier denunciations and instead pretend that Trump’s endorsement is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Conservative Approval.
As I continued checking the headlines, the news just kept getting crazier and crazier:
The Newt Gingrich campaign is gearing up to challenge the results of the Florida Republican presidential primary based on the Republican National Committee’s own rules which state that no contest can be winner-take-all prior to April 1, 2012.
Does anybody else remember how, in 2000, we all hated Florida Democrats for trying to change the rules of the election after the election was over?
Then there was Ann Coulter praising RomneyCare’s individual mandate — the same kind of individual mandate that conservatives are demanding that the Supreme Court declare unconstitutional.
But it isn’t just politicians and pundits who have succumbed to this mass psychosis. Everybody’s gone crazy all of a sudden, so that there was this headline:
Accused teacher’s behavior was
reported decades ago, students say
Crazy, right? And also this:
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — Detectives in Cumberland County have charged a Greensboro doctor with seeking sex from someone he thought was a 14-year-old girl.
Vijaya-Prakash Boggala is charged with felony solicitation of a child by computer to commit unlawful sex acts.
A spokeswoman for the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office says the 31-year-old doctor was wearing hospital scrubs when he was arrested Tuesday in Fayetteville parking lot where he had arranged to meet an underage girl. Authorities say that person was an undercover sheriff’s deputy whom he met on Internet.
This guy is smart enough to get a medical degree, but apparently too stupid to know that every “teenage girl” on the Internet is either (a) an undercover cop, or (b) Chris Hansen of Dateline NBC.
That’s crazy, but not nearly as crazy as the rumor that Smitty told me. I’d arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina, with about a half-hour to change planes for Washington, and was waiting for my next flight when Smitty called to say that he got an e-mail saying that CPAC — the annual conservative conference in D.C. that I’ve been covering every year since the late 1990s — had decided to set up a “credentialing” process where you have to apply in advance merely to be allowed to cover it.
“What? Are you kidding me?” I said. “The folks at CPAC are my friends. I’ve been doing this gig for years. They love my coverage. All I do is show up and they give me credentials — carte blanche, wherever I want to go, whatever I want to do. Somebody must be pulling your leg.”
“No, I think this is official,” Smitty said, and recounted a bizarre tale about how CPAC had decided to outsource the credentialing process to some non-profit outfit, which had been granted authority to decide who was permitted inside the so-called “Bloggers Lounge.” And so, according to the rumor Smitty heard, unless you filled out an application and submitted it by a certain deadline, you wouldn’t be allowed to cover the conference.
“But Smitty,” I said, “that’s completely insane. Do you have any idea what a public-relations nightmare they’d be dealing with if, for example, they tried to ban Andrew Breitbart from CPAC because he didn’t submit his application on time? It’s silly. Who told you this crazy stuff?”
Then he told me. But it’s so crazy you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.
Anyway, I’m going to CPAC, and all my friends at CPAC will be happy to see me, and if anybody tries to “ban” me from anything, don’t worry: You can always find me in the lobby bar, or wherever the cool private parties are happening.
