Mitt Romney — or, rather, Romney’s handlers — showed his teeth last week. Not a pretty sight, orthodontists notwithstanding.

The invisible hand always leaves a footprint, though, and we can begin to limn the nature of the campaign’s movements and strategies, as they shake the Etch-A-Sketch and move into full-on campaign mode.

In APRIL!!! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

But there is a method to that madness, as well.

What have we seen of Mitt’s weaknesses in the past couple of weeks? And what has been done to alter perceptions?

Well, Mitt has been sucked into the GOP’s war on women. So, the narrative was, first, THERE IS NO WAR ON WOMEN. Then: Oh My Ghod! They’ve attacked MOTHERS! (Never question motherhood in a nation whose natal chart is ruled by Cancer, the astrologer would tell you.)

And then: 92.5% of all JOB LOSSES UNDER OBAMA ARE WOMEN’S JOBS!!

OK. Mission Semi-Accomplished. The stark division has been muddied, and the “War on Conservative Women” meme can launch, absorbing and deflecting women’s legitimate anger into being mad at that LESBIAN who said them awful things about Ann Romney not working and Bill Maher says horrible misogynistic stuff and he gave Obama a MILLION DOLLARS and Obama HAS TO GIVE IT BACK!!!!

And, today’s Weakness du Jour: Mitt Romney is mean to dogs.

Mitt Romney belongs to a religious cult that does not allow dogs to gamble.

Again, don’t criticize dogs in the Good ‘Ol USA. (I’m only being semi-Sirius about this.)

It’s all right. This campaign is not going to be run on rationality. It is going to be run on pure reptile brain. Obama SCARY! Mitt NOT a cultist!

And so forth.

But look at what the Rovian Brains behind Mitt’s fangs have ginned up as a response to the famous “Seamus the Irish Setter” scandal, and, significantly, we see the Usual Suspects working hand-in-glove here:

Bam Bites Dog
The political perils of personal attacks.
By JAMES TARANTO
The Wall Street Journal

… In January Obama adviser David Axelrod–not to be confused with Axelrod, the Flying A Dog–blew a dog whistle. He tweeted a photo of the president with Bo, the White House canine, in what appears to be the back seat of a limousine. Axelrod’s comment: “How loving owners transport their dogs.”

In a more serious vein, Lincoln Mitchell of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute writes at the Puffington Host: “For many voters, treating a dog this way is unimaginable and could only be done by somebody who has a problem empathizing with others.”

But then Jim Treacher, the Daily Caller’s resident wag, picked up his dog-eared copy of “Dreams From My Father,” Obama’s 1995 autobiography, and sniffed out this passage from the second chapter. If Axelrod’s tweet was a dog whistle, Treacher’s post is a dinner bell:

With Lolo [Obama's stepfather], I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.

It reminds us of the conclusion of the sci-fi tale “A Boy and His Dog”: “It’s a cookbook.”

Which is, in addition to the snark and the sleaze, literarily incorrect. Passing over the lack of ethics in giving away the ending to a classic short story, it ought be noted that Harlan Ellison wrote “A Boy and His Dog,” and its tagline was NOT “it’s a cookbook.” That was Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man,” which you might remember from the Twilight Zone episode made from it.

Harlan Ellison, not-author-of “To Serve Man”

And it clearly doesn’t remind “us,” since the amateurish error is entirely Taranto’s, as any superficial fact check would have quickly proven. (Ellison’s novella, “A Boy and his Dog,” ends with a witty pun on good taste, which is probably why it escaped Taranto’s memory, since, demonstrably, that is a subject in which he is unversed.)

Never let it be said that James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal was well read. No: Rupert don’t want no writers what read good, Rupert wants writers who write bad. (Or, actually, write bad good.)

Taranto sets up the false dichotomy. Then, quoting someone else, supplies the reptile-brain “counter-argument.”

The Daily Caller, funded by Foster Friess — who’s such a control freak that when the SuperPac he funded wouldn’t spent more money in Wisconsin a few weeks ago, PERSONALLY made Santorum radio ad buys – continues its role as a political assassin. Here’s the reptile brain argument:

Mitt may not be good to dogs, but AT LEAST HE HASN’T EATEN THEM!

OBAMA EATS DOGS!

And, I guess, he’s Hitler, but that’s a slur for another day.

But consider the clear strategy emerging: whatever your weaknesses, turn them against your enemy. (I don’t say “opponent” because the President is not seen as an opponent, as, say, John McCain still understood. No: Obama is the ENEMY.)

Being sold online

Women hate Mitt?

Obama is evil to women! He takes money from WOMAN-HATERS who use the C-Word! Someone who likes him said that MOTHERHOOD ISN’T HARD WORK!

Mitt has a problem with dog-lovers?

OBAMA EATS DOGS! OMG! (Panties twist and untwist, cue the Evil Barbie Corps on Faux Nooz.)

And just LOOK at the blogswarm of MEETOOs that was launched.

Lather, rinse and repeat.

Ask yourself who that invisible hand is, but don’t doubt its handy footwork.

But this is targeted media manipulation at the sub-rational level. It is utterly amoral and historically effective.

Your mind is not important to them. Only your gut-level reactions are.

If that doesn’t bother you, then fasten your seat belt, sit back and enjoy the ride.

But please don’t call it “democracy.”

It barely reaches the moral heights of demagoguery.

Courage.

============

UPDATE: Right wing tool Jake Tapper (of ABC News) helps to push the non-story, as though he were an actual journalist. Tapper has a long history of sleazy, amateurish stories on President Obama, going back at least to his “I smelled tobacco on him” bit of high-school newspaper journalism in 2008. Oh wait. No high school newspaper editor would have run that. I wonder if they’d have run THIS:

Apr 17, 2012 11:02pm
Romney Campaign Notes that Obama as a Boy Ate Dog Meat*

Much has been made about Mitt Romney, in 1983, putting his family dog Seamus in a kennel on top of his roof and driving from Boston to Canada, with said canine Seamus making his displeasure known in a rather scatological way.

Democrats have signaled they have every intention of making sure the American people — especially dog-lovers — know the tale. In January, senior Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod tweeted a photo of the president and Bo in a car, with the snide observation: “@davidaxelrod: How loving owners transport their dogs.”

The Romney campaign signaled Tuesday night that they are not about to cede any ground when it comes to a candidate’s odd past with man’s best friend.

And the Obama campaign shot back, with a spokesman suggesting the Romney team was attacking a child, since the Obama act in question took place when he was a kid.

The Daily Caller noted that in President Obama’s best-selling memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” the president recalls being fed dog meat as a young boy in Indonesia with his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro.

[...]

*This post has been updated.

Headline. Young Obama ate Dog as a child, while Jake Tapper eats something far worse as an adult …

And, I have been (snarkily) informed that Taranto’s little literary trope is a “joke.” Which is funny since, in order for something to be a joke, it has to a) be funny and b) be funny.  If you have to explain that it’s a “joke” and not another clueless assertion in an article filled with clueless assertions and snark, then it’s not a “joke.”

=============

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted  from his blog

 Any astrologer worth her salt would tell you that there is not a lot of good that you can expect from a grand Supreme Court argument over the future of health care, held on a day when Mercury is retrograde, Saturn is retrograde, and Mars is retrograde.  And, since, like global warming, astrology is easily refuted, except by observation, allow me to make this observation on the madness of the zeitgeist.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times conspired this weekend to deprive Socrates of his wits and reaffirm the verdict of Orestes:

There are numerous tales and stories associated with Pallas Athene, including her name, which was originally simply Athene.  One day she was sparring with her foster sister, Pallas, daughter of a local sea-god and more than likely a cousin of hers, when Daddy Jupiter distracted her, causing her to accidentally kill her sister.  As part of her grief, she set her name before her own.

She was seen as a protector of cities, a prophetess, and invincible in battle.  Mythologically, she helped Hercules with his labors, assisted Odysseus in his voyage from Troy, and gave Perseus a hand disposing of Medusa.  She also gave Athens the gift of the olive tree, beating out Poseidon’s gift of the horse.  To appease him, the gods deprived Athenian women of their citizenship, their vote, and the right to give their children their surname.  Thus, from that point on, women began to lose their rights and this was blamed on Athene.

This was further reinforced in the trial of Orestes, which boiled down to who the true parent of a child was, the mother or father.  Since Pallas Athene was born of a man, she testified that it was the male parent who was most important.  Apollo, who defended Orestes, also stated that the mother only provided a place for the seed implanted by the male to grow.  Needless to say, this did not move feminism forward….

Which is, when you think about it, what we’re debating in the Forty-Nine states that have either passed or considered legislation that, in essence, enshrines that most important and sacred seed to the detriment of the physical choice of the women in whom said seed has been sprouted.

At least, the verdict of Orestes has been the template for the past few millennia —  although it is now under siege by that absurd idea that women are people, too. The oogly-boogly and mumbo-jumbo have been roiling over Health Care, so-called, by Luntzian Strategem, “Obamacare” so successfully that people refer to it as the latter and not “The Affordable Health Care Act,” as they refer to the Estate Tax — originally meant to keep America from becoming balkanized by an hereditary oligarchy — as the “Death Tax,” thus enraging millions who will never possibly have the slightest chance to be subject to the estate tax, since their estates at death will be worth considerably less than two million dollars.

Fewer and fewer every day, in fact.

Although today, the radio leads me to understand,  the issue at hand will be whether anyone has thus far been injured, thus rending the case moot for the moment, since the Supreme Court established long ago that it would not rule in hypothetical cases. Thus, the sophists will argue whether there has or has not been harm, and, given the astrological tenor, and the willingness of the Alter Boys to TAKE this case, the most spectacular of legal gymnastics ought to be forthcoming as the speechifyin’ ends and the deliberatin’ begins. Then, in their own sweet time, we shall learn if the case of the Angry Reaganauts Versus Health Care for All Americans (or nearly all) shall be adjudicated.

More fun that the lead plaintiff, the fellow tryin’ ter shove a stake through the black heart of Obamamamacare is Antonin Scalia’s former clerk, as is John Roberts, Jr., our Chief Justice, the former law clerk of the late William Rehnquist, he of the Golden Stripes, now residing in Hell in Roger Taney’s Circle. (Do not feel sorry for Wild Bill Rehnquist of Arizona, for, as Shaw said, the damned feel perfectly comfortable in hell; after all, it was made for them.)

But, to get to that, we should begin with this, from the New York Times:

… Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, [author of The Rightous Mind, Jonathan Haidt]  sets out to trash the modern faith in reason. In Haidt’s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions. Even Glaucon, the cynic in Plato’s “Republic” who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched, was “the guy who got it right.”

To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided…

Which is, if you think about it, oxymoronic: if reason cannot be trusted, is merely a rhetorical trick, then the technology and brain research being invoked cannot be trusted, ergo, his arguments are undermined by his own arguments. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

But this is mere prologue. I will state here that I utterly oppose the chemical-mechanistic approach to human consciousness — the notion that we are merely survival machines, bearers of DNA, operating merely as a series of responses to environmental stimuli via complex chemical reactions. But the scientists’ conceit is, itself, oxymoronic. We return to Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” in the sense that the ONLY reality that any single human possesses is their individual, personal, subjective perception. “Objectivity,” is a paradigm, unless you can scare up an “objective being” which either takes us back to St. Anselm, or else into mysticism, and neither is the point here.

I only experience my own world, and you only ever experience your world. “Objectivity” is the bridge we build between them.

The “objective paradigm” of the scientists refutes human reality. You don’t really think or reason: you are merely chemical reactions. The “automotive” approach to the body as a machine, whose parts you can swap out — as Dick Cheney swapped his old blood pump for a new one — and the entire movement from the psychology of Freud and Jung — which attempts to understand consciousness from inside — to the rat psychology of B.F. Skinner, which is preferred in our Universities, because you can turn subjective reality into objective numbers.

Quantification. But how can you measure love?

The con here is the trick that “objective” reality trumps human, universal, irrefutable reality.

Thus do our jurists play with the “objective” reality of the Constitution, as governance and law eternally attempts to codify and describe reality, “objective” — that is to say, sensorially reproducible results, like a mile, or hot, or tall or deep. But, if you’ve spent any time with humans, you will realize that this is a consensus, and there will always be ONE contrarian who will maintain that day is night and up is down and will die in defense of their interpretation of “objective” reality.

You see, Clarence Thomas — surely the deepest thinker among the Alter Boys, that five-justice Catholic majority that has gifted us with so many 5-4 decisions. I do not mean any aspersion on the Church or its politics, but shared consensus on subtle religious values is going to tend to create subtle consensus on “secular” values, unless there’s a type of human being that I have not yet encountered and no one’s told me about. Birds of a feather actually DO tend to flock together.

As I was saying, Clarence Thomas is on record as wanting to seriously modify the Commerce Clause, the Federal Government’s authority to regulate interstate commerce, the reason that Washington and Madison and Mason sat on Washington’s porch and contacted those who would eventually call for, get, write, campaign for and ratify a constitution.

This is an ideological point. It is a point of belief about the words in the Constitution and not the practice of the Constitution by actual human beings upon whose contractual basis pretty much all economic and human activity is based. The interpretation of those words is quite literally the foundation of the government, the bedrock on which all other laws are based or in conformity WITH.

And it is like unto the scientist who sneers at all subjectivity — for no slur in science is more cutting than “but that’s subjective!” when there is naught BUT subjectivity. And yet there is no perfectly “objective” world — unless you have mistaken the certitude of numbers for the uncertainty of subjective reality.

That paradigm of objectivity is what allows our civilization to function, just as money lubricates the gears of trade and commerce, when NEITHER exists. Money is sometimes paper, more often just numbers transliterated into the ones and zeros of binary code. And objectivity exists nowhere. It is, as well, a comforting fiction, that allows us to discuss the Great Issues of the Day which we, in our objectivity, “witness” via electronic and printed media.

The mile is experienced differently by every single human who experiences it, even if it is the same mile though the same valley on the same path.

And I fear that the Affordable Health Care Decision will be the Dred Scott of our age, and that tragedy will ensue. I don’t know what kind of tragedy, but it is in the air. To tinker with the interpretation of the Sacred Words of the “objective” Constitution, Clarence Thomas’ view might well push us off a cliff. There is no question that at least four Justices were chomping at the bit to hear this case, and I can make an educated guess as to which four.

In this case, the baby may literally be thrown out with the bathwater. Actual human lives will be irrevocably affected by whatever decision is effected. Things is bad.

As outside the courtroom the age-old question is being debated:

the trial of Orestes … boiled down to who the true parent of a child was[:] the mother or father.  Since Pallas Athene was born of a man, she testified that it was the male parent who was most important.  Apollo, who defended Orestes, also stated that the mother only provided a place for the seed implanted by the male to grow.

In this case, the seed is termed “a baby,” thus the contraception debate, the planned parenthood debate, et al and etcetera.

And that has to color the strange Gladiatorial (and, for the first time, sort of live on radio) reality show as four angry male Justices, specificially appointed to be “safe” votes to overturn Roe v. Wade in its latest iteration or any iteration to come, one swing vote — Anthony Kennedy of California — three female Justices — probably anti-ditto — and my favorite Justice, Steven Breyer – Breyer’s pragmatic approach to the law “will tend to make the law more sensible” — of San Francisco.

The theater of the proceedings will be magnified thereby, and one wonders what effect this newfangled media circus will have on the mysterious and secretive workings of the Court. Either way the coin comes up, there’ll be hell to pay out here in subjective realityland. They’re already screaming about how their last shreds of freedom are being stripped from them (which is, frankly, immoderate and frightening language virtually guaranteed to overamp some poor lost soul who treasures his Second Amendment rights.)

On the other side, lips are bit, as are fingernails, and pundits gravely assure us that the Supreme Court will behave rationally, and, as they all PROMISED, would abide by stare decis – “let it stand”– and respect precedent.

Them what did done lied before and I am not comforted in the assurance that them what lied before will not lie agin.

The aegis of Athena with Medusa’s head

Just as I do not believe that Plato’s Socrates sockpuppet was wrong,  nor do I read tea leaves, as seems to be the pundit class’ singular pursuit this evening. And the circus is in town. Let’s see how it plays, but I do not believe that it will be objective.

This is the first time that the Supreme Court has tried a case using the Reality Show concept.

Let us devoutly hope that our Supreme trial is under that aegis of Athena.

Or maybe not.

And as the Learned Nine emerge,

robed in black and primly trussed;

we’ll hear their wisdom on display

and measure if they’re truly Just.

Courage.

======================

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog.

The failure this week of the so-called congressional supercommittee to agree on a package to reduce the federal budget deficit comes down not only to Republican intransigence, but really to that of just one conservative in particular, a man referred to as the “13th member” of the committee.

Specifically, many on both sides — including Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, a prominent member of the supercommittee — called out Grover Norquist, the extremely powerful anti-tax activist in Washington, for his role in keeping Republicans from agreeing to any new taxes.

Norquist wields much of his power due to the anti-tax pledge signed by most Republicans in Congress, and his ability to enforce that oath by working to defeat any who renege.  All six of the GOP members of the supercommittee had signed on to the Norquist pledge.

Perhaps this doomed the supercommittee from the start, given that Norquist had blessed the Republican supercommittee members this summer.

The supercommittee was supposed to recommend more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years to be considered by Congress on a fast-track basis. The panel, known formally as the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, bogged down mostly on partisan lines, however.

Indeed, after the co-chairs of the bipartisan supercommittee announced that the panel would not be agreeing to a deal, the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined, “Thank You, Grover Norquist.”

“Democrats on the Committee made clear everything was on the table. Our offers were balanced. We walked the line of shared sacrifice, however difficult, and we proposed painful choices for programs we care about deeply,” says Kerry, who reportedly tried until the very end to get the supercomittee to forge a compromise. “However, we simply could not overcome the Republican insistence on making tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans permanent. We would not give another $550 billion tax cut to the wealthiest. Shifting the tax burden to the middle class was not the way to reduce the deficit. This was simply doctrine for some of our Republican colleagues, even as many worked very hard in good faith to find a better way forward.

“I believe it would have been unconscionable to ask middle class Americans to finance more tax cuts for the wealthy while seniors on fixed incomes paid the price,” Kerry adds. “People need to remember: The Committee was created to cut the deficit not to cut taxes for the wealthiest, the exact tax policies that didn’t create jobs and gave us deficits in the first place. The bottom line is that no Super Committee can succeed with Grover Norquist as its 13th member.”

YOU CAN WATCH A VIDEO PRODUCED BY SENATE DEMOCRATS ABOUT NORQUIST’S INFLUENCE HERE:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

The "Declaration of the Occupation" originally was published in the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

Three weeks into the Occupy protests that began on Wall Street and have now spread to every corner of the nation, bemused and befuddled commentators and lawmakers in Washington still insist on claiming that the demonstrations lack a clear objective or set of demands. But that’s not really true.

While the protesters are not marching in support or opposition to this or that specific legislation or individual policy, the brave and spirited folks animating this new movement certainly do have a clear goal. Their agenda is admittedly broad, but that simply speaks to just how wide and deep corporate influence has become in our country.

The long list of grievances is reflective of just how widespread the tendency of big business and the super-wealthy is to “place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality.” Those aren’t my words. They come directly from the protesters themselves, from their own published “Declaration of the Occupation,” approved entirely by consensus back on September 29.

As with any strong declaration, the protesters begin with a powerful preamble:

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individualsto protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.

The protesters go on to enumerate a pretty complete list of what’s wrong with our country today, from the illegal foreclosure process which has led to too many Americans losing their homes, to the poisoning of our food supply through negligence, and undermining the farming system through monopolization, and of course the bankers who happily took our tax dollars for bailouts only to turn around and resume paying themselves exorbitant bonuses at our expense.