Monday, February 27, 2012

Alex Castellanos's Lament: O Sparta, Where Art Thou?

Fellow GOP Elitists And Party Bosses:

Things are looking grim for our candidate. Despite my successful efforts at disinformation at CNN and MSNBC — political newbie Alex Wagner fell for our "Sparta v. Sparta" plant — designed to sustain the increasingly false aura of inevitability in Mitt Romney as our nominee building momentum propaganda around his campaign with specious comparisons to the Obama campaign, what we've got here instead is a multi-million dollar LAME-O going up against ANIMAL KINGDOM. To make matters worse, the candidate's weekend workouts in advance of tomorrow's race were dreadful!
  • What to do about a candidate telling Michiganders he likes cars and his wife drives two cadillacs?!
  • How to overcome the optics of a candidate mincing around in obviously brand new jeans as if they're giving him a rash in the nether regions?!
  • Or handle a candidate who can't stop talking about the trees in his home state, noting weirdly they're "the right height"?!
  • Then saying he doesn't follow NASCAR "as closely as some of its most ardent fans. But I have friends who are NASCAR team owners."?!
We're in "deep dooh-dooh" my fellow Establishment elitists, to quote our esteemed Bush patriarch.

This is some juggernaut, eh? With OPTICS like these even my namesake will stop buying the "Sparta" bullshit.


Sparta was famous and legendary for doing more with less. It did not have unlimited resources, and did not win its wars by overwhelming its enemies with expendable numbers until it razed them to the ground, like the carpet bombings of Dresden and Japan in World War II. Sparta was virtuous (they did not lie like Romney), courageous (they did not cower behind anonymous benefactors like Romney), and fiercely efficient —unlike Romney, they could fill a space like Thermopylae and look to the enemy as if they were thousands instead of 300.

Rachel, our fearless enemy combatant, immediately grasped the significance of these images: Mitt Romney is flawed — how did she put it ... "not a very good candidate" — and his much touted campaign is not very competent. Sparta? Whatever's left of it in a bankrupt 2012 Greece.

We are beginning to hear GOP Establishment rumbles and grumbles. The message is clear: Mark Halperin and Susan Page, "objective reporters" both according to Chris Matthews (ha-ha, I know, Chris is a soft target) are already bailing on Mitt Romney, per instructions.

For Susan who baffled Chris by suggesting the Romney-Paul alliance was a "friendship" thing, then astutely backtracked having reached the limit of his credulity, even a Romney squeaker in his home state of Michigan would place his "path to the nomination back on track." That was said in the friendly confines of the neutered PBS News Hour.

That's spin, of course. Not how I'd say it, but I can't be babysitting our media moles 24/7. Tonight on Rachel our worst nightmare, Michael Moore, made the right call: A Romney "win" by a couple of points in his home state would be the same as a disastrous loss. Fortunately for us, that silly "40 yard" crowd of Chris's discounts and ignores anything Moore says. That should buy us some time to spin a squeaker with our narrative and the Beltway Media's cooperation.

But do we want to? That is the question. Our Party elders, both of whom would be stronger candidates today — Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee — criticized the Republican race with almost the same coordinated language. Huckabee lamented the "toxic atmosphere" while Jeb, with his usual understatement, found our candidates' rhetoric to be "a little troubling."

My friends, when Jeb and Mike speak out in unison, just days before the critical Michigan and Arizona primaries, that's our cue to pivot to Plan B. Mitt is on notice and Rick is unacceptable; he's off the reservation. Should Mitt not win Michigan decisively, we must pivot to serious consideration of a brokered convention — Plan B. A late entry against Santorum's momentum, charging out of a Michigan "upset" with a full head of steam, is untenable.

Our white knight — be he Jeb or Mike, or Mitch or Chris — must not go head-to-head against Rick, and face the possible ignominy of a primary defeat. I've done my part, playing the Media elites. Scored a bit of a coup, too, by signaling our (the GOP Establishment) distancing from Romney and Santorum to the Times' Maureen Dowd:
IT’S finally sinking in.

Republicans are getting queasy at the gruesome sight of their party eating itself alive, savaging the brand in ways that will long resonate.

“Republicans being against sex is not good,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.”

He said his party is “coming to grips with a weaker field than we’d all want” and going through the five stages of grief. “We’re at No. 4,” he said. (Depression.) “We’ve still got one to go.” (Acceptance.)
Nice bit of niche marketing, eh? Now the Beltway Media can begin to pivot away from defining our party as "outdated" and "ghastly" to being more sex-friendly (forgive my chauvinism, but being overly P.C. would be non-authentic) and "coming to grips with a weaker field than we'd all want" — which means, of course, that the Beltway Media has our officially sanctioned permission to consider the alternative.

I've done my job, fellow snobs (inside joke, ha-ha); it's now up to you to rescue our Party. There's an old Cuban saying that goes: A beber y a tragar, que maƱana el mundo se va a acabar. (Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow the world ends.)

¡Salud, chicos y muchachas!

~ Alex ~

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