Leslie Savan

Eye of Newt

Leslie Savan on December 8, 2011 - 5:04 PM ET

You may have seen this already—it’s been the wallpaper at MSNBC for days—but le mot juste is juste that:

Ron Paul is right, of course: Newt Gingrich is a serial hypocrite and a vicious one at that. (What I like best about the ad is how each phrase flashed on screen fades at the end, suggesting that Newt, like Cain, Perry et al. will, too.) But he’s here now, his numbers are busting out just as the holidays eclipse politics until the January 3 Iowa caucuses, and that leaves a lot of us—Dems and moderates, naturally, but also most of Newt’s former colleagues in movement conservatism—absolutely dumbstruck.

Gingrich, if you remember,was not only fired as Speaker of the House by his own party, but became the face of an intransigent and bullying faction so full of its own sense of self-importance that he was depicted on the cover of the New York Daily News as a wailing, red-faced baby. And among Republican leaders, if not the base, that’s still how Newt registers. Former New Hampshire governor John Sununu, a Romney surrogate, said this morning, “I don't think Newt Gingrich cares about conservative principles. He cares about Newt Gingrich.”

And while Gingrich now says, “I’m much more mature than I was as Speaker” (being third in line under the Constitution for the presidency being a mere break-in cruise for Newt’s personal development), there’s really very little to show of a “New Newt.” For every moment of restraint he’s displayed during a debate, like saying the party of family values shouldn’t break up immigrant families who’ve been here for a quarter-century, there’s been an equally outlandish comment on the trail, like suggesting that poor children work as school janitors or that poor kids have never known anyone who works for a living (!?!).

But maybe we shouldn’t be completely shocked at Gingrich’s rise. After all, today’s tantrum-throwing, hostage-taking Republican Party was fostered by behavior like Newt’s—acting like a scheming pro wrestler, screaming as he puts weight on one leg or dripping ketchup from a nonexistent wound, is now second nature to the GOP. They’re like people raised on a diet of green bell peppers who, over the course of the last two decades, have slowly been adding jalapeños to the sauce until nothing short of pepper spray even merits a red-hot warning. By now, they’re so used to Newt’s exaggerated howling they can’t hear anything else—especially not poor Mitt’s marble-mouthed me-tooism.

As Speaker of the House, Newt was his party’s stepping-off point into irrationality, into demanding far more than was ever good for them and then complaining even when they got it. That is the Tea Party to a T—from causing America’s credit-rating downgrade to throwing the tantrum of the constant filibuster. The one promise Gingrich has kept to the base is to never compromise with reality—at least not rhetorically. No matter what he’s doing, whether it’s dealing away the key demands of the Contract with America or going on a Greek cruise soon after kicking off his candidacy, Newt’s always saying that it’s done for a higher, grander cause, like, say, countering the forces of Kenyan anti-colonial socialism. Newt’s the kind of guy who doesn’t just take out the garbage, he visits the dustbin of history.

Paul Krugman said it best, when he explained in a recent column why Gingrich hasn’t (yet) been burned by his own fire-breathing hypocrisies.

If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, conservatives often seem inclined to accept that tribute, voting for candidates who publicly espouse conservative moral principles whatever their personal behavior. Did I mention that David Vitter is still in the Senate?

And Mr. Gingrich has some advantages none of the previous challengers had. He is by no means the deep thinker he imagines himself to be, but he’s a glib speaker, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. And my sense is that he’s also very good at doublethink—that even when he knows what he’s saying isn’t true, he manages to believe it while he’s saying it. So he may not implode like his predecessors.

Self-deception is a fundamental requirement of today’s extreme Republicanism, as is dumbing oneself down. In order to promote obviously ludicrous notions (like that Obama “represents a hard-left radicalism. He is opposed to free enterprise. He is opposed to capitalism,” as Gingrich said this week), Republican leaders must necessarily “be totally cynical or…be totally clueless,” Krugman writes. “The fact that the party is committed to demonstrably false beliefs means that only fakers or the befuddled can get through the selection process.”

Helped by the calendar and an appalling ignorance fed by Fox News, Newt may just walk through the fires of his own hypocrisy unscathed.

And some of us thought only salamanders could do that.

Watch Out, Little Children, the 'Job Creators' Are on Strike

Leslie Savan on December 7, 2011 - 10:41 PM ET

An absolutely illuminating post by Thomas Frank in Harper’s traces what happens when the 1 percent grab their picket signs and go on strike. From John Boehner’s September 15 announcement that “job creators in America are essentially on strike” until they get their tax cuts and other enrichments to Ayn Rand’s fictional, masters-of-the-universe strike to the “capital strikes” that really did take place during FDR’s tenure—they’re all of a moldy piece. Frank writes of the

revolt of business interests, which were supposedly struggling to preserve laissez-faire political conditions by withdrawing investment from the economy in 1937, sabotaging the recovery and the chances of President Roosevelt. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes delivered a ferocious iteration of this theme in December of that year, warning that “the United States is to have its first general sit-down strike—not of labor, not of the American people—but of the sixty families [a then-popular term for what we now call “the 1 percent”] and of the capital created by the whole American people of which the sixty families have obtained control.” Should Americans yield to the demands of the walkout, Ickes warned, “then the America that is to be will be a big-business Fascist America—an enslaved America.”

Frank continues:

Perhaps this was the historical episode that inspired Ayn Rand to write Atlas Shrugged, the thousand-page 1957 novel in which politicians badmouth business, and business leaders launch a vast counterattack—a capital strike—that does indeed bring the nation to its knees. As Rand’s entrepreneur-hero John Galt announces in one of the book’s most famous passages: “We are on strike, we, the men of the mind. We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.”

While the modern-day Galts, from Ronald Reagan to Scott Walker, have relentlessly attacked unions and equate labor strikes with commie fests, Boehner in a speech to the Economic Club spoke approvingly of strikes—but only for the Big Boys. From his website: “Speaker Boehner said ‘job creators in America are essentially on strike,’ paralyzed by “the constant threat of new taxes, out-of-control spending, and unnecessary regulation from a government that is always micromanaging, meddling, and manipulating.”

Other self-proclaimed “men of the mind,” like mentalist Newt Gingrich, have come up with a very Depression Era solution to all those workers getting rich on “unearned rewards”: fire ’em and get their kids to scrub toilets.

You Can’t Say Romney’s Not Transparent

Leslie Savan on December 7, 2011 - 1:23 AM ET

Remember when Mitt Romney said during a debate kerfuffle that of course he wouldn’t allow “illegals” to work on his lawn? “I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake,” he said. “I can't have illegals.”

Now he’s telling Fox News anchors that of course he values them. “I’ll be on Fox a lot,” he told Neil Cavuto on Tuesday, “because you guys matter when it comes to early primary voters." (h/t:TPM)

Message: He cares about winning the presidency.

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Morning Joe: Newt’s a Flip-Flopper of Romnetic Proportions

Leslie Savan on November 29, 2011 - 8:13 PM ET

Newt Gingrich is riding high right now, surpassing Romney in most polls, and if Herman Cain drops out because allegations of a thirteen-year extramarital affair on top of a bunch of sexual harassment charges are just too much for any fledgling pseudo-candidate, what’s left of the Cain train will probably hitch onto Newt’s caboose. (TPM: “among Cain supporters, Newt Gingrich has clearly been favored over Romney as a second choice.”)

But to Joe Scarborough, who served loyally in then-Speaker Gingrich’s 1994 “Republican Revolution,” Newt is one of those joke candidates, like Cain, who “should not be running for president of the United States.”

The Morning Joe host said Tuesday that he just thinks Gingrich is a flip-flopper of Romnetic proportions. He could barely stop laughing at Newt’s claim in a radio interview that he’s “a lot more conservative than Mitt Romney.”

Scarborough, who’s been scorching Newt for two consecutive days now, says that back in ’74 and ’76, Gingrich “ran as a Rockefeller Republican,” and even bragged about it. And while Scarborough assures us “this isn’t personal. I think it’s kind of funny,” Joe goes on to recall, “In 1994, he actually came into my race [in Florida] to endorse the moderate in my race, and said I was quote too conservative to get elected. Of course, I got 62 per cent of the vote.

“But that’s always Newt. Is it in fashion to be moderate this year, or is it in fashion to be conservative this year?…

“I’ve got nothing personal against Bachman, I’ve got nothing personal against Cain. I’ve got nothing personal against a lot of these people. But a lot of them should not be running for president of the United States.”

The segment ends with a quiz, Who Is the Real RINO?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Pepper-Spray Cop Begets Pepper-Spray Shopper

Leslie Savan on November 26, 2011 - 8:02 PM ET

First we had the Pepper-Spray Cop. Now we have the Pepper-Spray Shopper, an as-yet unidentified woman who allegedly sprayed open an avenue for herself amid crowds grasping for Black Friday bargains in an LA-area Walmart. Apparently, she needed an Xbox at half off.

As the Los Angeles Times described it:

20 customers, including children, were hurt in the 10:10 p.m. incident, officials said. Shoppers complained of minor skin and eye irritation and sore throats….

The woman used the spray in more than one area of the Walmart “to gain preferred access to a variety of locations in the store,” said Los Angeles Fire Capt. James Carson.

“She was competitive shopping,” he said.

Of course, big box stores have long encouraged “competitive shopping.” After an employee was trampled to death at a Long Island Walmart on Black Friday in 2008, stores vowed to improve their crowd control. But they don’t advertise their sales with the words “door busters”—with that hint of drug-raid-level violence—for nothing. They know that hysteria can drive higher sales. It works so well that stores have been moving door busters back earlier and earlier, so that this year Black Friday at Walmarts across the country began on Thanksgiving night, forcing employees to work on the holiday in order to sow the itching powder of urgency among customers.

Friday’s “Day of Spray,” as TPM dubbed it, included not only reports of an off-duty cop pepper-spraying a shopper during a disturbance at a North Carolina Walmart, but a cop tasing someone in an Alabama Walmart, and shootings and robberies outside Walmarts in South Carolina and California. (I won’t pin any of these actions directly on this obnoxious, constantly running Walmart TV commercial, but it does portray a shopper as a babbling, practically drooling idiot.)

But the suspected Pepper Spray Shopper—who turned herself in to police, though her name hasn’t been released—provides the most telling example of our twisted economic times. If she did what she’s accused of, then this woman picked up the same device she’s almost certainly seen police use against Occupy protesters and used it against her fellow citizens; she may be part of the 99 percent, but a competitive edge is a competitive edge.

And that is, of course, what the 1 percent want, a debilitating free-for-all among the masses in the Promised Land of constant competition. Stay divided and be conquered. Sic the middle class on, say, public-employee union members for their health benefits rather than demand that corporations (like the famously anti-union Walmart) provide decent benefits.

Republicans tell you all the time: don’t direct your frustration at the “job creators.” They and their tax breaks must be defended in the name of “freedom,” and sometimes, sure, it takes an increasingly militarized police force to do it. Pop culture doo-dads like HD TVs, Xboxes, the latest i-Product—the tokens of capitalist acceptance—on the other hand, are worth gassing your neighbor over.

This Ayn Rand logic was in fact what set the Tea Party in motion in early 2009. Remember CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli’s rant on the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Traders? He was incensed at a White House proposal that would have helped troubled homeowners restructure their mortgages. “This is America!” he yelled, and, turning to the traders behind him, asked, “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand!” To which the traders booed as of one throat. “President Obama,” Santelli shouted, “are you listening?”

Helping your neighbor in a crisis—even if you’d also help yourself by preserving the value of your home—well, that just smacks of socialism. In fact, any sign of public cooperation should be regarded with suspicion. As the UC Berkeley chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, wrote of Occupy demonstrators there two weeks ago, “linking arms and forming a human chain…is not non-violent civil disobedience.” It’s a dangerous hint of collectivism, a Hayek-raising horror that must be stopped before that human chain fetters the 1 percent.

We’ll know for sure that the masses get it when they finally start using private drones for Presidents’ Day sales. Until then, vigilance…

Best Line of the Week on Newt's Alleged Smarts

Leslie Savan on November 20, 2011 - 8:04 PM ET

Even as Sunday talk show pundits laugh at Newt’s follies (like his claiming that Freddie Mac hired him as a “historian”), they never tire of rhapsodizing about his supposed smarts. He’s “intellectually formidable” (Mike Murphy on Meet the Press); he’s “a very smart guy” (Matthew Dowd on This Week).

I think, though, that Paul Krugman, also on This Week, put it best: “Somebody said he’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.”

The Newtifying begins about two minutes in:

Herman Cain and the Politics of Eyeliner

Leslie Savan on November 14, 2011 - 2:17 PM ET

Did you know you can tell a lot about the motives of women involved in sexual harassment cases by their makeup? Especially their eyeliner, or lack thereof? Here’s how the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser began a column (“Jobless & Shameless Gal Going for Gold”) on one of the women charging Herman Cain with sexual harassment:

Gold diggers—unite! Sharon Bialek is 50, out of work and, according to one who knows her, she’s a smooth operator living way above her means. From the look of her heavily painted face, she’s also soon to be in acute need of a new tub of eyeliner.

Rush Limbaugh echoed the line along with all the other bile he’s been splurting at Cain’s accusers, referring to Bialek as “the woman who wears makeup by the tub.”

The makeup slam is odd, and not only because Bialek doesn’t appear to be wearing more of it than many women on TV. During the 1991 Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings (which inspired a pro-Cain ad to declare him the victim of another “high-tech lynching”), the right’s take on female makeup was: the more the better! Former Reagan and Bush I speechwriter Peggy Noonan had determined that the eye makeup worn by a witness for Thomas made her believable, was proof, even, that she was one of “normal humans,” as opposed to the feminist abnormals with unadorned eyes.

You could see it in the witnesses. For Anita Hill, the professional, movement-y and intellectualish Susan Hoerchner, who spoke with a sincere, unmakeupped face of inherent power imbalances in the workplace. For Clarence Thomas, the straight-shooting, Maybellined J.C. Alvarez…. Ms. Alvarez was the voice of the real, as opposed to the abstract, America: she was like a person who if a boss ever sexually abused her would kick him in the gajoobies and haul him straight to court.

Good ’ol J.C. (wherever she may be now) wouldn’t have bothered to file some movement-y complaint or sign furtive nondisclosure documents and get all weirdo anonymous about it. No, this populist gal would have just hauled her gajoobied boss straight to court. In Noonan’s fantasy world, Ms. Alvarez’s reputation wouldn’t be dragged through the mud, and she wouldn’t be targeted by lawyers like Herman Cain’s, who chillingly warned any potential accusers that they “should think twice” before speaking up. The judge would flat-out believe Ms. Alvarez’s word over her boss’s, simply on the strength of her real Americaness and her Maybelline.

The right’s attitude toward the way women look, from their eyelashes to their bosoms, is bifurcated and crisscrossed, based on a Madonna-or-Whore myth that even they're having a hard time keeping straight.

On one hand, we have Peyser and Limbaugh asserting that Bialek’s looks indicate she’s a conniving hussy; Peyser also derides Bialek for being a “bleached blonde” and her lawyer Gloria Allred for wearing “patent-leather do-me pumps.” (Let’s hope Peyser doesn’t blurt this out to Fox News’ many blonde, stilettoed and deeply cleavaged anchors.)

On the other hand, we had Noonan saying that drugstore cosmetics are a sign of working-class heroism, not to mention of being “normal.” (To her credit, Noonan isn't going there in the Cain situation.)

It’s difficult to follow the zigs and zags of the conservative cosmology of cosmetics, which is as arbitrary as the conservative cosmology of skin color. It will change on a dime, depending on which dame, or black candidate, they want to valorize or demonize.

They make up the rules on makeup, along with everything else, as they go along.

Ragin' Tea Party Rep. Joe Walsh Screams at His Constituents

Leslie Savan on November 9, 2011 - 3:59 PM ET

Maybe I have Republican-men-in-blatant-denial on the mind, but my first thought on seeing this incredible video of rage-filled Tea Party congressman Joe Walsh (R-Ill) screaming at constituents was, “So this is why his wife divorced him.” Walsh, of course, is the far right–winger who’s refused to pay his former wife child support but was nevertheless honored recently for his “unwavering support of the family” by Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council.

Here, at a “Cup of Joe with Joe Walsh” event in Gurnee, Ill. (h/t Think Progress), the first-term congressman rages at a man who politely asks about the cozy relationship between bank lobbyists and elected officials, he screams in the face of a woman who dares to contradict him on Wall Street regulations and he just generally loses it.

It’s striking how much Walsh doesn’t want these constituents (apparently, not an OWS hippie among them) asking intelligent, well-informed questions. If he wasn’t yelling and threatening to eject them, he was repeating talking points (the market knows best, the market knows best, the market knows best) and accusing them of not listening.

When ragin’ Joe asks for more coffee, they good-naturedly tell him to make it decaf. He doesn’t crack a smile.

See the full video here.

From Bill Ayers to Obama’s Grades: How the Cainites Avoid Talking about Sexual Harassment

Leslie Savan on November 4, 2011 - 12:11 PM ET

The diversionary tactics are getting tackier. TPM’s Benjy Sarlin has compiled all the “Things That Don’t Affect Whether Herman Cain Sexually Harassed Two Women In the 1990s.”

Bank of America Will Refund Your $5 for a Simple, One-Time $10 Refund Fee

Leslie Savan on November 2, 2011 - 3:39 PM ET

Andy Borowitz channels Bank of America as it tries to make nice after dropping plans to charge costumers $5 a month to use their debit cards.

“Dear Valued Costumer,” BofA writes. “We are writing to you today with a simple message: ‘Our bad.’ And to tell you that we are refunding the $5 to you, effective immediately. All you have to do is pay a simple, one-time $10 refund fee.”

And more...