If I weren't a gentleman, I might opine that this is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever read:
A win in the electoral college that is not accompanied by one in the popular vote casts a shadow over the president and his ability to govern.
No. If he wins the Electoral College, he governs. Period. You can look it up! The only people who won't accept this outcome are people who don't recognize the legitimacy of two-party government, i.e., the Republican Party. Please be more accurate in the future, Ms. Tumulty. It's part of your job description.
If Obama is re-elected that way, “the Republican base will be screaming that Romney should be president, and Obama doesn’t represent the country,” McKinnon predicted. “It’s going to encourage more hyperpartisanship.”
Because the last four years have been so harmonious, and because Republicans have never questioned the President's legitimacy up to now. You'd almost think that suggestion is being made here that the President should simply resign his office for the sake of the Republic. But I digress.
Veterans of the Bush White House understand that problem well. Bush was never able to shake the accusations of some Democrats that he had “stolen” the 2000 election in a recount of Florida votes that required a U.S. Supreme Court decision to determine the winner. Then-Vice President Al Gore had won the popular vote that year by 500,000 votes.
A Supreme Court decision was not "required" to determine anything. The Court directly intervened to decide the election. Which, if not stolen, was quite clearly rigged:
Specifically, the purge system disproportionately impacted African American voters who are placed on purge lists more often and more likely to be there erroneously than Hispanic or white voters. For instance, in Miami-Dade, the state's largest county, over 65% of the names on the purge list consisted of African Americans who represent only 20.4% of the population. Hispanics were 57.4% of the population, but only 16.6% of the purge list; whites, 77.6% of the population but 17.6% of those purged.
But we can agree that President Obama, if re-elected in such a manner, will need to make lots of conciliatory gestures towards Republicans because fake history:
Once in Washington, Bush made a point of inviting Democrats such as the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) to the White House for movie nights, and he celebrated the 100th day of his presidency by throwing a picnic on the White House lawn for members of Congress. One of his first big legislative initiatives was the No Child Left Behind education law, which won bipartisan support.
“We made those decisions very deliberately, as a sign of healing and to bring the country together,” Hughes said.
She's lying, Ms Tumulty, and it is an integral part of your job to know this:
Bush withdrew from the diplomacy with North Korea to control its development and production of nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell, after briefing the press that the diplomatic track would continue, was sent out again to repudiate himself and announce the administration's reversal of almost a decade of negotiation. Powell did not realize that this would be the first of many times his credibility would be abused in a ritual of humiliation. Swiftly, Bush rejected the Kyoto treaty to reduce greenhouse gases and global warming, and presented a "voluntary" plan that was supported by no other nation. He also withdrew the U.S. from its historic role as negotiator among Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs, a process to which his father had been particularly committed.
In short order, Bush also reversed his campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and canceled the federal regulation reducing cancer causing arsenic levels in water. He joked at a dinner: "As you know, we're studying safe levels for arsenic in drinking water. To base our decision on sound science, the scientists told us we needed to test the water glasses of about 3,000 people. Thank you for participating." He appointed scores of former lobbyists and industry executives to oversee policies regulating the industries they previously represented.
As his top priority Bush pushed for passage of a large tax cut that would redistribute income to the wealthy, drain the surplus that the Clinton administration had accumulated, and reverse fiscal discipline embraced by both the Clinton and prior Bush administrations. The tax cut became Bush's chief instrument of social policy. By wiping out the surplus, budget pressure was exerted on domestic social programs. Under the Reagan administration, a tax cut had produced the largest deficit to that time, bigger than the combined deficits accumulated by all previous presidents. But Reagan had stumbled onto this method of crushing social programs through the inadvertent though predictable failure of his fantasy of supply-side economics in which slashing taxes would magically create increased federal revenues. Bush confronted alternatives in the recent Republican past, the Reagan example or his father's responsible counter-example of raising taxes to cut the deficit; once again, he rejected his father's path. But unlike Reagan, his decision to foster a deficit was completely deliberate and with full awareness of its consequences.
Domestic policy adviser John DiIulio, a political scientist from the University of Pennsylvania, who had accepted his position in the White House on the assumption that he would be working to give substance to the president's rhetoric of "compassionate conservatism," resigned in a state of shock. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio told Esquire magazine. "What you've got is everything---and I mean everything---being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis . . . Besides the tax cut . . . the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded non-partisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism."
If this piece of analysis is not a textbook case of dishonest journalism, I really don't know what is. Its entirely premised on a Republican talking point, and uses other Republican talking points to support it. A high-school English student with Google access could have written something more accurate, and one can only wonder when Glen Kessler will weigh in to assign some Pinocchios to his colleague, though I won't hold my breath waiting for it to happen.
On the other hand, to be fair we should probably call out the President himself, whose silly and self-effacing philosophy of Looking Forward, Never Back™ has only helped to reinforce the culture of collective amnesia among the members of a privileged Beltway news media that cannot forget quickly enough the numerous atrocities that were visited upon the Republic from the very first days that the Cheney gang of neocon freebooters came to town---because, frankly, they were complicit in the atrocities, and because those movie nights at the White House were so much fun to cover while the Mayberry Machiavellis looted the Treasury, slimed their opponents, and leveraged the deaths of 3,000 Americans to launch an unlawful war.
Either way, this egregious example of lazy, context-free reporting should be enough to disqualify Karen Tumulty from ever having a bylined article appear in a major newspaper again. But of course, you know it won't.
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Baron V
