The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Poll Proves Mitt’s Mud Gun Works?

Posted on | February 20, 2012 | 69 Comments

The report that Mitt Romney has cut Rick Santorum’s lead from 15 points to 4 points in Michigan goes to show what can be accomplished with a multimillion-dollar attack-ad campaign, especially when those attacks are assisted by Mitt’s friends in the liberal media.

However, as Santorum himself has often pointed out during his speeches, Romney won’t have either of those advantages — a bigger campaign fund or a more friendly media — when it comes time to face Barack Obama.

Let’s hope Republican primary voters in Michigan and elsewhere have the intelligence to understand which of these two candidates is the GOP’s best chance in November. Because Mitt ain’t it.

Category: Election 2012, Michigan, Mitt Romney, Polls, Rick Santorum

Comments

69 Responses to “Poll Proves Mitt’s Mud Gun Works?”

  1. SDN
    February 20th, 2012 @ 7:14 pm

    Romney’s allies are as dishonest as Romney himself.

  2. A Stephens
    February 20th, 2012 @ 7:41 pm

    “Marriage equality”?

    I believe Rush refers to these folks as seminar callers.  Or obviously in this case, seminar commenter”

    Pathetic.

  3. Pathfinder's wife
    February 20th, 2012 @ 7:43 pm

    To Poly: I was thinking of more seedy places than Las Vegas , although Amsterdam can be pretty dismal.  Still, as you yourself have noted — not exactly nice places to live if you’re not rich enough to get yourself a nice little place in a gated community and the best schools.  As a person in criminal justice you should know first hand that the people who have to live cheek and jowl with “liberty leave” can’t stand it, because they’ve got the burden of having to deal with its consequences.
    And in each place the moral standards have been loosened up — did it make them nicer, or did the rot just go deeper?  Did they have to pass even more laws to keep the rot from creeping?  Usually they did, and it usually came at the behest of average citizens who were fed up with the rot.  Of course, this costs money , taxpayer money.  It also breeds the conditions whereby somebody (a real zealot but usually of the totalitarian bent) eventually comes in, says “I’ll do something…but you’re going to have to give me and my party a little quid pro quo, follow our new rules for your own safety and well being…by the way, I promise to punish the people who are responsible for this mess”, and the everyday folks go for it with a gusto, because they’re sick of the rot and they’re sick of the clean up…and they’re mad.

    And that’s usually how liberty dies and things take a turn for the really nasty.

  4. Pathfinder's wife
    February 20th, 2012 @ 7:49 pm

    Oh, and I should have added: and that totalitarian guy with all the answers usually finds a minority or two to pin the blame on (because they are a small segment of the population and easy to marginalize), and the crowd goes along with it, because they are mad.
    Then the place in question really becomes a place of no liberty and a not so nice place to live.

    That’s the way it usually plays out (it always has before, it is now, it will again); it’s just human nature.

  5. polypolitical
    February 20th, 2012 @ 7:49 pm

    He does refer to people as “seminar callers” when they call and spout pre-written talking points. I think it is hilarious that you feel that is what I am doing just because I feel that homosexuals should be allowed to marry.
    I can articulate a logical argument and I support a much smaller government that you probably do; yet over social issues and changing societal mores you call me pathetic.
    Have a better argument, my friend? I think we can get along, shrink government and change this country for the better. I want government out of these issues and don’t want to force my views on you. How am I pathetic?

  6. A Stephens
    February 20th, 2012 @ 7:55 pm

    Like anybody really gives a rats behind what people do in the privacy of their own homes.

    But somehow those folks have convinced themselves that they, and monitoring whatever behavior they may or may not be engaging in, are higher on a list of priorities than, pretty much anything else a president has to do.  Whatever.

  7. Finrod Felagund
    February 20th, 2012 @ 7:57 pm

    I don’t see Rick stopping with the alienating of libertarian allies, though, unfortunately.

  8. Finrod Felagund
    February 20th, 2012 @ 8:04 pm

    I support a Catholic candidate, he’s just not named Rick.
     

  9. Multimedia Group
    February 20th, 2012 @ 8:18 pm

    I simply do not understand the “Santorum is a religious zealot meme”. It is baseless and mindless.  There are two types who believe this: 1.) those who want to believe it because they don’t intend to vote for Santorum anyway and 2.) those who are ignorant (used in the technical sense of the term.).

    As Mark Levin said this evening on his show, are Santorum’s SoCon beliefs that far off from Mormon SoCon beliefs? Are they that far from the recently converted to Catholicism beliefs? Levin said about the only candidate we have who is not socially conservative is Ron Paul and he, Levin, didn’t really care about that anyway. So how is it that Santorum is the Boogyman who can’t be elected because he’s socially conservative? It’s ludicrous.

    Indeed, one only need look back at the founders to find guys that were MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more religiously zealous to find that Christian people of faith then as now, are among the most tolerant and least likely to force their personal religious beliefs on the population as a whole. Except to the extent that Christian beliefs tend toward the civil society (the foundation of America after all), one can hardly find evidence that a devout Christian in the White House would do anything more than INCREASE freedom for the individual.

    Libertarians don’t realize that Santorum would be their greatest ally because he knows that his own faith and beliefs are under attack from the totalitarians in the White House.  I heard him talk last night here in Georgia and was very impressed by his zeal for individual liberty.

    The quote of the evening was, “The best government program is freedom”.

  10. Pathfinder's wife
    February 20th, 2012 @ 8:26 pm

    Well…I do care to some extent what goes on in the privacy of people’s homes.
    If you’re pimping out your 11 yo. daughter so you can buy your next fix — which later causes daughter to wind up in rehab with a case of AIDS and herpes (all of which the taxpayer will pay for, because you are too much of a junkie to even support yourself, much less care for your kid that you pimped out) — then I do care, because it affects society (hey, little girl is ruined, money gets spent, and how many johns went home with some nice STDs to spread around because they wanted some fun with a little kid and thought her being so young she’d be “clean and safe”?).

    Just a little vignette from one of my former jobs, and why I have my reasons for not completely supporting everything the libertarians support (sorry fellas, even if it was legal, it would still cost money, which means junkie’s going to do whatever it takes to get the fix, some of which aren’t so nice or conducive to a free or civil society).

    If a president makes a stand and says “I don’t believe this is a good route to take and I won’t go for federally legalizing it…and would seriously caution the states to think twice before they do”, then that president has a good point.  Note that there is no coercion, no rule by fiat — just somebody saying “I don’t agree with that”, and that is just fine by me (maybe we do need to talk about this sort of thing, because it’s wrecking people and society has to pay for it).

  11. A Stephens
    February 20th, 2012 @ 8:41 pm

    Wow, tough visual there.  I was referring to consenting adults, evidently quite naively.  What you’re describing is blatant lawlessness, on multiple levels in my view.

    And yes, it is time we had this conversation in this country.  Santorum seems to be the best positioned, and the most eloquent spokesman, for making the case.

  12. K-Bob
    February 20th, 2012 @ 9:02 pm

    How very non-decent.

  13. Guest
    February 20th, 2012 @ 10:02 pm

    First, while I recognize Obama’s abortifacient mandate as a pretty serious infringement of Church institutions’ rights, I don’t exactly have a lot of sympathy for them: they went all-out to support obamacare in the first place and are upset now not because Obamacare is a massive disaster, but because it looks like the same rules will be applied to them that they had assumed would only hold for everyone else.
    Second, while I am a Catholic and (currently) a Santorum supporter, I AM NOT a Santorum supporter BECAUSE he’s a Catholic any more than I oppose Mitt Romney because he’s a Mormon.

  14. ThePaganTemple
    February 21st, 2012 @ 8:01 am

     They still support Obamacare, that’s what doubly pisses me off about them. They should have to provide birth control, and for that matter, abortion coverage. Piss on them. Having said that, I don’t hold that against Santorum or any other right thinking conservative Catholic.

  15. Bob Belvedere
    February 21st, 2012 @ 8:36 am

    Very interesting last point, Adj, because, now that I think of it, I, too, would not vote for a candidate who was an avowed Atheist.

    I’m reminded of what Russell Kirk once said: …it seems to me that a high degree of ordered, civilized freedom is linked closely with religious belief…. If the great troubles of our time teach mankind anything, surely we ought now to recognize that true freedom cannot endure in a society which denies a transcendent order’.

    I’m sure Mr. Kirk argued [I don’t have all his works at hand at the moment] that those who so deny lack ‘moral imagination’, which helps one to employ Right Reason in making the correct decisions.

    John Adams wrote in 1798: …we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with
    human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition,
    revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our
    Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made
    only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the
    government of any other….

  16. Bob Belvedere
    February 21st, 2012 @ 8:40 am

    Agreed.

    Morality is connected to all things, including economics, etc.  I’m glad Mr. Santorum is pointing out the connections.

  17. A Question For Your Consideration « The Camp Of The Saints
    February 21st, 2012 @ 9:24 am

    […] a post by Stacy McCain wherein he speculates that Willard Mitt Romney’s negative campaign against Rick Santorum is […]

  18. The Wondering Jew
    February 21st, 2012 @ 9:32 am

    Absolutely.  Absent some substantial change of heart of direction, I would find it almost impossible to support Santorum, the number three Senate Republican (i.e. very much a member of the GOP establishment) who has been so hostile to small-government conservatives.  It would simply be a harsher replay of the two Bush terms– and as if the fiscal motivations that drove the Tea Party (and Republicans) to record successes never happened.   Romney has many flaws, but I think a Santorum nomination would be a disaster politically and substantively for the party.  He seems to live  in a fantasy-land in which Ron-Paul types have been running the GOP for the last decade.  Unfortunately, it’s been Rick-Santorum-types that have been running the GOP in the last decade– that’s why the party is in such dire straits.

  19. Pathfinder's wife
    February 21st, 2012 @ 10:50 am

    She wasn’t an isolated case either, or the worst (otherwise she wouldn’t have gone where she did — the bad cases are handled differently), and it isn’t just girls (it isn’t even just humans either).
    Want to know more?  I’ve got plenty of them — and just from one spot in one place in time.  Does that tell you something?

    People can truly get up to some nasty stuff.