2010 Elections

But “military reservist” just reads way better, doesn’t it? It also sounds awesome to say, as DeVore did in a debate, that you were “shot at in Lebanon.” What DeVore meant, though, was that he was shot near in Lebanon, while he was a college student on a media tour.

The LA Times talked to a corroborating witness to the “I was shot at” story.

DeVore mentioned that former ABC News correspondent Bob Zelnick was among the journalists on the tour. Zelnick said the group climbed an observation tower in Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory, from which the Bekaa Valley could be seen. He recalls the Israeli troops taunting the Syrians, who fired shots in response. But Zelnick said they were out of range and that Israeli journalists present had publicly teased him for reacting to the gunshots. “Nothing I saw or experienced could reasonably be interpreted as our having been driven off the hill by Syrian fire,” he said.

An exciting tale of heroism!

This RedState post typifies the movement conservative response to this obvious distortion by DeVore: They blame Fiorina and accuse her of trashing the military.

DeVore is in third place in the polls, with Campbell and Fiorina running basically neck-and-neck. But DeVore is “the Tea Party candidate,” because he’s unelectable, though Fiorina is obviously more concerned with beating the socially moderate Campbell. (Palin recently defied the Tea Parties by endorsing Fiorina.)

(Meanwhile, Boxer’s primary challenger, make-believe Democrat Mickey Kaus, seems to have been replaced at his longtime professional home, Slate, by Tom Scocca. Mickey is simply operating his usual blog — as counterintuitively anti-immigrants/unions/LA Times/Ezra Klein as ever — at a sad-looking “campaign” website.)

Rove has no great love for Rick Perry or Mitt Romney, but his raison d’etre is getting Republicans elected and viciously smearing Democrats, so he’s charging ahead without waiting for the party to settle on one of those jokers. American Crossroads, Rove’s shadow-RNC is launching ad campaigns targeted at President Obama’s campaign stops, accusing him of wanting to raise everyone’s taxes. (“The message is somewhat misleading,” ABC News says, but because “Karl Rove lies” is a “dog bites man” story, they don’t devote much ink to it.)

American Crossroads has “a fundraising goal of $240 million for the election season,” according to Politico, and anyone who doesn’t care for the management of the RNC or who doesn’t want a donation to a candidate publicly disclosed can chip in without fear of exposure.

American Crossroads will, of course, also be spending tremendous sums of money on Congressional elections. Democrats will struggle to keep up, especially with a demoralized liberal base and all of American big business basically united against them.

Anonymously funded outside groups will dominate the campaign no matter which guy the GOP primary voters land on. To them, it doesn’t matter which guy gets the nod — the Republican party will take care of its donors, as it always does.

NFIB and Lincoln have teamed up to launch a campaign urging the EPA not to do anything about greenhouse gases, and she details her fight in an interview with Environment & Energy Publishing’s E&E TV. It’s not a very coherent interview, as Lincoln just repeats an endless flood of talking points (uninspired ones, too) and verbally treads water. She’s a politician, not an expert on policy, or anything else. The basic idea is that there are too many regulations, and regulations are bad.

Monica Trauzzi: EPA hasn’t yet sent its proposed rule of greenhouse gas emissions for utilities to OMB. The deadline is September 30. Do you take that as a sign that maybe there are some other regulations that they’re thinking of rolling back on?

Sen. Blanche Lincoln: I certainly hope so. I mean, that is definitely what we’ve been aiming for is to make sure — and you can go to our Website, www.sensiblereg.org, and that is where you can see these small businesses talking about what they face on a day-to-day basis, the cost of it, the time, how it is, you know, prohibitive towards them being able to reinvest their resources into their businesses to create new jobs. And it’s not just the new regs that come out, it is the uncertainty of what happens. You know, you’re exactly right, delaying that greenhouse gas emission rule is something that should be done if we don’t have all the facts, if we don’t have the appropriate cost-benefit analysis, if we don’t have the appropriate analysis of what, you know, is going to actually happen with that. OMB has got to have — I mean, sometimes it can take them two or three or four months, you know, to get that information out. And that is absolutely appropriate and it should not go forward until we have all that information. But when there are over 4200 new pending regulations out there, it just creates this unbelievable arena of uncertainty in businesses large and small, but particularly small, because they get hit harder. They’re not going to take their own money and spend $10,000 or $10 million, because they don’t know what those types of regs are going to cost them.

Uncertainty is bad, so the EPA must delay its new regulations as long as possible. 4,200 new regulations!

This is all fairly standard-issue Republican cant. Which isn’t surprising: The oil and gas industry were another of Lincoln’s major funders. (Lincoln also received more money than any other Democrat from ALEC, the organization that helps major industries write their own right-wing legislation in statehouses across the country.)

Blanche Lincoln’s loss proved that out-Republicaning the Republicans is an insane way to try to win an election, but Democrats never bother to learn that lesson.

That’s what she told the crowd assembled at Women’s National Republican Club in New York, where she was apparently booked to speak at the same time that she was booked to be interviewed on cable news by that guy from “The Apprentice.” The New York Observer was there:

“I want to apologize for being so late, I know that’s not respectful of your time, so please accept my apology,” Ms. O’Donnell began. “We started out at about five o’clock in the morning at Fox and Friends and we’ve gone nonstop until the final stop at CNN a few minutes ago.” No mention was made of the walk-out that Mr. Morgan was hyping on Twitter.

O’Donnell was even asked about the unfairness of the liberal media, and she declined to bring up any sort of ill treatment she may have suffered at the hands of Larry King’s replacement.

I think O’Donnell was probably just nervous about being late for this other thing, and so she came up with an excuse to bolt early. As someone who is chronically late and frequently anxious, I can relate! Speaking to an Observer reporter after her talk, O’Donnell made her abrupt departure sound like a scheduling issue.

“We were late for this, and he wasn’t ending, and we were going, ‘Wrap up, wrap up!’ He was late and he wasn’t ending. He’s looking for ratings. He’s looking for ratings. He was being rude, and I said, ‘Piers, I gotta go!’ You know, I’m late already! He’s looking for ratings, and trying to stir up a controversy.”

Of course, then O’Donnell said other, weirder things:

There is a double standard at work for women candidates, Ms. O’Donnell told The Observer: “In the 2008 campaign, no one would have dared ask Barack Obama, ‘How are you going to control your libido. You’re a strapping young man. What are you going to do around all those interns?’ But people can ask Michele Bachmann about her migraines.”

Yes, right, of course. It is a double standard that the press would be interested in Michele Bachmann’s chronic migraines but not in Barack Obama’s strappingness and heretofore unnoticed out-of-control libido.

I understand that O’Donnell meant to call the media’s prurient-seeming interest in her past romantic escapades hypocritical, without drawing attention to That One Thing With the Ladybug Costume, but perhaps she should have come up with an actual example of a double standard, instead of just saying things that make no sense and that also could be … taken the wrong way. (“Strapping!” Is that the word you think of when you think of Barack Obama?)