Gas-baggery

There are some blogs that I read more or less everyday. Greg Sargent's Plum Line is one of them. Jonathan Bernstein's Plain Blog About Politics is another. I'll be sharing a post from him later today. But first a link of a link of a link that I came upon via Andrew Sullivan. It's always fun to go down the rabbit hole of links, skipping from site to site. Sometimes I come upon a site or writer that I wasn't familiar with and they end up earning a spot in my daily reading rotation. Suffice it to say, I don't think I will bestow Mary Matalin with that honor anytime soon.

Let's look at the opening words of her analysis of the 2012 election results.

"What happened? A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice..."

Now if you didn't know Matalin's political persuasion ahead of time, which presidential candidate would you assume she was talking about? Maybe the one who has run what some have called a "post-truth campaign?" Maybe the person whose mendacity has been chronicled to a staggering degree? Well, you'd be wrong. She's talking about Obama. Not President Obama, of course, but the shady mustache-twirling villain Obama that the right has invented out of whole cloth.

The final paragraph is pretty amazing.

"Unfortunately and unfortuitously, forces of nature bookended the general election: Our convention was compromised by one weather disaster and our momentum stalled by another. Two human hurricanes also radically altered the political atmosphere: Bill Clinton’s unique windbaggery constituted a campaign updraft, while Chris Christie’s deplorable and gratuitous gas-baggery infused the campaign with a toxic political pollution."

First off, unfortunately AND unfortuitously?! I'm pretty sure those two things mean the same thing. Also, they're synonyms. At least they would be if "unfortuitously" was a word, which it isn't. And funny enough, when I was researching that fact I came across another instance of someone being baffled by her usage of this "word" way back in 2006. Irregardless, I'm sure I've used made up words before too, so let's just drop it.

What I'm really interested in is that last sentence. After she asserts that the Republican convention was ruined by a nature disaster and not THIS COMPLETELY AVOIDABLE DISASTER, Matalin finally settles on blaming Bill Clinton for being an effective political speechmaker and Chris Christie for being a decent human being.

Here's an example of the "toxic political pollution" that Christie spewed all over Mitt's pristine glide to the presidency.



Wow. Someone from the one party praising someone from the other party for doing their job well in a crisis. Gag! Toxic! This from the same person who routinely chides Obama for not being bipartisan enough.

You know what? You're right, Mary Matalin. I do sense some gratuitous gas-baggery going on here. Gas-baggery, indeed.

So how does this relate to the Dem16 race? Well, how the right chooses to react to Obama's victory will have a big impact on how effectively he can govern in his second term. And that in turn will have an effect on the mood of the country and how candidates position themselves in relation to him going into '16.

Also, people like who talk like this are either completely cynical or completely insane. And both deserve to be called-out and ridiculed.