A return to the multiverse
As readers of the Daily Caller know, I have access to an alternative universe where Mitt Romney has been President of the United States since January 2009. Everything else is the same. I recently visited this alternate reality — it’s called Earth 2 and is accessible through the multiverse portal, if you want to get technical — and did some channel surfing to see what was going on:
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George Stephanopoulos: “And we’re back with our roundtable. Before the break we were talking about the scandals of the Romney presidency — the NSA spying, which has damaged not only the constitution but our relationships with allies, the Benghazi attack, which the Washington Post has reported on for 37 straight weeks and has just won a Pulitzer Prize for, the war on women, and now the health care mess. Yes — Ariana?”
Arianna Huffington: “Gurge, I don’t know if America can survive the rest of Romney. Dis is truly a total deesaster. Dees ees a failed presidency…”
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Andrew Sullivan: “We had a window. Remember? In 2008. We had a window of opportunity. That’s the year that Barack Obama ran for president. For one brief, shining moment, we had the chance to say no. No to endless wars and drone attacks. No to crushing deficits and debt. No to the politics of fear and hate and division. No to eavesdropping on our fellow citizens. No to heterosexuality. But the American people weren’t ready for a black president.”
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Chris Matthews: “I just find this absolutely incredible, Senator. They knew. Come on, they knew. That 60 Minutes report was devastating. They knew that Benghazi was going to get hit, the terrorists said it was going to get hit; they basically announced it months ahead of time. They knew it. And Romney, the snow white Mormon and genius businessman, was caught with his pants down. So he lied, and he told everyone around him to lie. He told them to blame it on some video. I gotta tell ya, Senator, this is worse than Watergate. This is worse than anything I’ve ever seen. This is the Bay of Pigs.”
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Rachel Maddow: “They. Don’t. Want. You. Having. Sex.”
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Chris Hayes: “On one hand, you have the very literal, very tangible, very palatable disaster of the health care website. But there is a metaphor here as well. Isn’t the sheer atavism of the website, the fact that it is something right outta 1990 if not before, doesn’t that, it seems to me, doesn’t that point to an atavism of conservatism itself? This is the movement that wants to take us back to the 1950s if not the 1850s. Can’t you stipulate that the subtextual message of the overt hermeneutics of health care is one of white privilege manifesting itself as anxiety over dialectical materialism?”
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Norah O’Donnell: “Be sure to tune in for part eight of our ongoing CBS special report: Benghazi: An American Disaster. Our guests include Carl Bernstein, Dana Priest, and eyewitnesses to the worst American foreign policy debacle in a generation. Where was President Romney the night of the attack? Tune in.”
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Soledad O’Brien: “Median family income for black Americans has declined 10.9 percent during the Romney administration. It has declined for other groups as well — 3.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 4.5 percent for Hispanics — but the figure for blacks is huge. This decline does not include losses suffered during the financial crisis and the recession that followed, but it instead measures declines since June 2009, when the recession ended. The poverty rate for blacks is now 25.8 percent. The black labor force participation rate, which rose throughout the 1980s and 1990s, has declined for the past decade and quite sharply under Obama to 61.4 percent. The black unemployment rate, according to Pew Research, stands at 13.4 percent. Among black, male, high school dropouts, PBS’s Paul Salmon reports, the unemployment rate is a staggering 95 percent. We will cover that in my upcoming special, Black in America XXXVI: Mitt Romney and the Great Leap Backwards.”
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Jack Shafer: “Monkeyfishing was more believable than the claims of Romneycare.”
Joe Scarborough: “Well, this is just great. President Mitt Romney hasn’t just been spying on you and me, he’s been spying on our allies. Mika is shaking her head in disgust, and I don’t blame her. It seems as if President Romney is intent not only on alienating Americans, but everyone else around the world also. I’m serious — wait, let me finish, let me finish — I think that this has set back foreign relations in this country 20 if not 50 years…”
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Bob Costas: “Did Mitt Romney have a hand in naming the Washington Redskins?”
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Paul Krugman: “We have a world-class budget deficit, not just as in absolute terms, of course — it’s the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world — but it’s a budget deficit that, as a share of GDP, is right up there. It’s comparable to the worst we’ve ever seen in this country. … The only time postwar that the United States has had anything like these deficits is the middle Reagan years, and that was with unemployment close to 10 percent. Take away the Social Security surplus spent by the government, and we’re running at a deficit of more than 6 percent of GDP, and that is unprecedented. We have the huge bulge in the population that starts to collect benefits. … If there isn’t a clear path towards fiscal sanity well before the next decade, then I think the financial markets are going to say, ‘Well, gee, where is this going?’ If we don’t get our financial house in order, I think we’re looking for a collapse of confidence some time in the not-too-distant future.”
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Ed Shultz: “Mitt Romney is a bald-faced liar.”